About or with teachers? A systematic review of learning analytics interventions to support teacher professional development

Abstract

Learning analytics (LA) allows aggregate data about users to support decision making. Although teachers are recognised as important stakeholders, little is yet explored about the role that LA can play in teacher professional development (TPD). This paper aimed to conduct a systematic review of the use of LA in TPD context, focusing specifically on intervention studies, classifying purposes and methods as well as beneficiaries’ engagement and lessons learned. Search terms identified 189 papers and 31 studies were selected based on the inclusion criteria. The results show that most studies adopted data-driven approaches to monitoring teacher behaviours, through automatic extraction of logs in technology-enhanced learning environments. The perspectives, benefits and limitations in the application of LA to TPD are finally presented.