The equalizing effect of teacher dashboards on feedback in K-12 classrooms

Abstract

Teacher dashboards provide real-time information about students’ performance and progress, which help K-12 teachers to adjust feedback to student’ specific needs during learning. Prior research indicated two problems with respect to how teachers provide feedback: (i) teachers do not always select the most effective feedback to support student’ learning and (ii) feedback is not allocated equally to students with different abilities. Specifically, process feedback is considered most effective yet is relatively scarce. In order to understand how dashboards influence the type and allocation of feedback, we compared characteristics of feedback given after dashboard consultation (dashboard-prompted feedback) to feedback triggered by teachers themselves or in response to students’ questions (human-prompted feedback) in thirty-five K-12 classrooms. Results showed that dashboards led to equal amounts of task and process feedback, while human-prompts led to much more task than process feedback and this difference was especially large for low-ability students. Hence the different types of dashboard-prompted feedback were more equally distributed among students of different ability levels. These results indicate that dashboards can have an important equalizing effect on teacher feedback practices.