Learning Analytics for Educational Improvement presents a framework for understanding how to conduct new forms of education research and enact new approaches to improving education practice made possible by big data. Although application of big data techniques to learning and education is quite new, learning analytics and educational data mining have been growing rapidly, fueled by the visible successes of applications of data analytics in the commercial and political realms. This book serves as a one-stop reference for a variety of learning analytics tools and techniques and makes those methods meaningful by describing their application in a wide range of real-world education contexts.