College of Education faculty member explores data use in informal learning

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the use of data becomes increasingly prevalent in sports coaching, and in teaching and learning settings overall, an emphasis is required on ensuring athletes possess an understanding of their performance to improve their abilities, according to a research paper co-authored by Penn State College of Education faculty member Ty Hollett and his former doctoral advisee and Penn State alumnus, Nate Turcotte.

Hollett, associate professor of education (learning, design and technology), and Turcotte, who received a doctorate in learning, design and technology from the College of Education in 2020 and is now assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology and Research in the College of Education at Florida Gulf Coast University, studied the data-rich experiences of golf coaches and students.

They reported their findings in “Over 800 Data Points: How Coaches and Athletes Collectively Navigate Data-rich Learning Encounters,” a paper published in Emerald Insight’s Journal of Information and Learning Sciences released earlier this month.

The study took place at the Golf Teaching and Research Center (GTRC) in the basement of Keller Building on Penn State’s University Park campus and at a Professional Golf Association golf course.

Hollett said he remembers discovering the GTRC by chance one day while on campus.

“I’m walking through the Keller Building and I keep seeing people carrying golf clubs around all the time,” he recalled. “Eventually, I just stopped somebody and said, ‘Where are you going with the golf clubs?’”

As it turned out, Hollett had stopped Eric Handley, the head of the center in the basement of the Keller building, who invited him down to see it.

Hollett visited the GTRC where, among other things, golfers hit balls into screens while being recorded by multiple cameras and sensors, which provide instant data on the golfer’s swing and ball flight. He said he was really drawn to what was being done and equated it to work in which he was already active.

“One thing I was really captivated by at that time, as I was in the beginning stages of studying learning and athletic settings and out-of-school spaces, was how learners use video to document and study their own practices,” Hollett said. “I had been studying skateboarders. So, I was just really interested in learners collecting data, in various forms, to learn together. In the GTRC they had multiple video cameras located throughout the space, weight distribution centers on the ground to basically track and analyze how golfers were moving and shifting as they struck the ball, and just about all the data broadly that they were able to collect.”

That sparked the idea for Hollett to begin looking into how instructors in non-traditional learning spaces — specifically in this case golf coaches teaching highly-skilled golfers how to become teaching professionals themselves — integrate data into the work they’re doing with learners. He brought on Turcotte, his doctoral student at the time, who had an interest in the intersection of sports and learning. Turcotte took on much of the data collection for his dissertation and later continued the work with a PGA Management program in Florida after taking on a position at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Turcotte found that coaches at both locations went about instructing their students and solving the same problems very similarly.

“They tend to look at very specific data points — how the club face hits the ball, the degree of the club coming down toward the ball, the ball flight path — there’s almost a subset of 10 to 20 data points that coaches tend to focus on, to break those data points into easily-digestible chunks where their players can make sense of them,” Turcotte said. “That’s where we find new coaches using their bodies, and more specifically using their bodies at varying scales to help their students interpret performance data.”

He is interested in finding out how methods used in golf instruction — and the reasoning behind those methods — could be of use in other teaching environments.

“Seeing the way instructors and students use their body, typically in the moment of a lesson, is really interesting to see, and how those practices might translate over to other teaching and learning settings, especially where the data may be more hidden, where those practices may be more hidden from learners and teachers,” Turcotte said.

One of the trickiest elements of learning, both in traditional and non-traditional settings, is making accurate assessments and getting valuable feedback to improve teaching methodology. In the sports world, Hollett said, there is one major advantage not found in traditional classroom environments.

Hollett said that in a sports setting, there is instant feedback on how well the student is learning because many sports outcomes are binary — either the objective, such as getting the ball close to the hole in golf, is achieved or it isn’t. Meanwhile in schools, testing often can provide an inaccurate assessment of whether the students are actually retaining the information being taught.

Hollett and Turcotte have also seen a trend in the way data is used in all facets of modern learning, which can have both positive and negative effects. They say ethically gathering and using data gathered from students will continue to be a challenge for all teachers.

“For me, I continue to come back to the idea that teaching and learning is increasingly ‘datafied,’” Turcotte said. “It is becoming a data-centric activity for both good and bad and I think both of us have some legitimate concerns over how that data is used and how that data is collected. So, we are able to take non-traditional contexts to explore very relevant and pressing educational issues and more specifically think about ‘What does humane data look like? What data is collected and how can teachers and learners come to collectively understand data together? How do those practices take shape? How do we have these relationships with data? How are they empathetic relationships and are they humane relationships?’”

He said the idea of transparency is embedded in that.

“It’s a question of how data is used and what goals is it serving and who gets to decide,” Turcotte said. “Who gets to have a voice in all of that? That is really the zoomed out, macro-level orientation, in this research.”