Evaluating Students’ Interpretation of Feedback in Interactive Dashboards

Abstract

Dashboards have long been used in business and engineering fields to provide users with a consolidated view of data to inform decision making. These decision makers are most often experts in their profession (for example, sales managers in business or pilots in engineering), who bring their expertise into the process of interpreting the data provided through the dashboard view. Dashboards are designed to use data to communicate information about areas that may need attention and action (Few, 2013). The rise of ‘big data’ across many industries has prompted new and innovative approaches to bringing together and displaying this data in ways that are meaningful and informative. With increasing amounts of data being collected about students’ behaviour in learning environments, it is therefore not surprising that the idea of building dashboards to provide an overview of student progress and performance has also become popular in education, sparking a range of dashboard development for students across all stages of education. In the educational context, learning dashboards have been defined as: ‘a single display that aggregates different indicators about learner(s), learning process(es) and/or learning context(s) into one or multiple visualisations’ (Schwendimann et al., 2017). While the majority of dashboards developed in education initially focused on providing information to teachers and administrators, an increasing number of student-facing dashboards are starting to emerge. For students, dashboards provide an opportunity to gain feedback on their learning activities and assessments, providing evidence to inform decisions around how they approach their study. Many universities, schools, learning management system vendors, and other educational technology companies are currently exploring innovative ways to deliver interactive dashboards to students which incorporate useful information displayed in ways that are easily interpretable by students. However, there is an emerging concern about students’ ability to interpret the data provided in dashboards in a way that is beneficial to their learning (Clow, 2013; Corrin & de Barba, 2014; Teasley, 2017). Research into student dashboards, to date, has tended to focus on measuring an increase in grade or a decrease in attrition in cohorts of students who have had access to a dashboard (Arnold & Pistilli, 2012). Other studies have sought students’ opinions about what 10 Evaluating Students’ Interpretation of Feedback in Interactive Dashboards