Student Facing Dashboards: One Size Fits All?

This emerging technology report reviews a new development in educational technology, student-facing dashboards, which provide comparative performance feedback to students calculated by Learning Analytics-based algorithms on data generated from university students’ use of educational technology. Instructor- and advisor-facing dashboards emerged as one of the first direct applications of Learning Analytics, but the results from early implementations of these displays for students provide mixed results about the effects of their use. In particular, the “one-size-fits-all” design of many existing systems is questioned based on findings in related research on performance feedback and student motivation which has shown that various internal and external student-level factors affect the impact of feedback interventions, especially those using social comparisons. Integrating data from student information systems into underlying algorithms to produce personalized dashboards may mediate the possible negative effects of feedback, especially comparative feedback, and support more consistent benefits from the use of such systems.