Associations between Students’ Standing Seen in Learning Analytics Dashboards and Their Following Learning Behaviours: A Study of Three Reference Frames

Abstract

An essential part of making dashboards more effective in motivating students and leading to desirable behavioural change is knowing what information to communicate to the student and how to frame and present it. Most of the research studying dashboards’ impact on learning analyzes learning indicators of students as a group. Understanding how a student’s learning unfolds after viewing the dashboard is necessary for personalized dashboard selection and its content. In the context of the discussion activity, we analyzed 28,290 actions of 896 students after they saw their learning status on the dashboards, which were integrated into 21 discussions in 11 courses. We provide a comparative perspective on three dashboard types: the class average, the leaderboard, and message-quality dashboards. Our results indicate that students’ behaviours after viewing three dashboards were associated with their displayed standing in the discussion: views showing the student’s status below the frame of reference were associated with a higher likelihood of posting, and views of the student outperforming the norm with diminished further posting, although demonstrating higher discussion engagement. We reiterate a need to understand the impact of dashboard states on students’ behaviour, creating a foundation for a personalized selection of dashboard views based on individual students’ standing.