An Introduction to Curricular Analytics: Research and Applications for Curriculum Assessment and Review

With the recent development of curricular analytics tools designed to quantify the structure of a curriculum (Heileman, Abdallah, et al., 2018), some institutions of higher education are examining their curricula to find ways that these pathways to graduation can be improved (McMurtrie, 2021). The tools used to analyze curricula were created to address an issue of importance in the field of undergraduate engineering, that issue being the decreasing enrollment trend over the past two decades. The purpose of this article is to describe curricular analytics in a broad sense to extend its reach to the higher education assessment community. This article discusses why curricular analytics is increasingly important, provides elementary definitions and the theory behind it, summarized prior research, provides an illustrative example, and concludes with a discussion of the potential applications for higher education professionals.