Renzhe Yu is an assistant professor of learning analytics/educational data mining at Teachers College, Columbia University. His core research interest is equity-oriented educational data science, which investigates how emerging data science techniques can help understand and improve educational equity. Toward this goal, he works with novel forms of “big data” (e.g., behavioral traces, online discourse) generated by learners, educators, and institutions in real-world contexts and performs three parallel lines of inquiries:
- Combine data mining and causal inference to generate fine-grained understanding of learning, development, and equity;
- Design algorithmic decision support pipelines to improve learning, development, and equity;
- Evaluate and improve the fairness, accountability, and transparency of educational data science applications.
Most of his empirical research focuses on young adults in low-resourced educational contexts, such as minority-serving, fully online, and broad-access institutions.
Yu received his doctorate in educational data science from the University of California, Irvine.