iSAT: a visual learning analytics tool for instructors

Abstract

Interactive Stratified Attribute Tracking (iSAT) is a visual analytics tool for cohort analysis. In this paper, we show how instructors can use iSAT to visualize transitions of groups of students during teaching-learning activities. Interactive visual analytics gives the instructor the affordance of understanding the dynamics of the class of students and their activities from the data collected in their own teaching-learning context. We take an example of a peer instruction (PI) activity and describe how iSAT can be used to analyze its clicker responses. During PI, typically instructors only use histograms to visualize the distribution of clicker responses in the pre- and post-discussion phases. We show that the use of iSAT to analyze clicker data in real time to trace transitions of participants’ responses during various voting phases can support them in planning for their post-PI activities. Seven patterns of transitions that emerge are aligned, returns, starburst, slide, attractor, switching, and void. We interpret them in the context of the example. Such transition patterns are neither available in multiple histograms of individual voting phase nor generated in real time to be visualized as a flow diagram. We had conducted two workshops to introduce iSAT to the instructors and demonstrated the workflow of using iSAT with their dataset. Here, we report usefulness and usability data collected from those workshops. In conclusion, we highlight the power of iSAT for instructors to do cohort analysis in their teaching-learning practice.