Supporting Students’ Self-Regulated Learning of Study Behaviour with a Learning Analytics Dashboard

For students at university, self-regulated learning (SRL) of study behaviour is crucial, as it is (for example) related to academic achievement and study satisfaction. Improving students’ SRL is, therefore, a meaningful endeavour. However, students are not always capable of effective SRL. To support students’ SRL learning analytics (LA) are proposed. LA refers to measuring, collecting, analysing, and reporting data to better understand learning processes and the environment in which it occurs. Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) are specific LA interventions, visualizing data to (e.g.) learners or teachers. This dissertation explores a LAD’s design and effectiveness in supporting students’ SRL of study behaviour.
Chapter 1 describes the three main components in this dissertation: SRL, study behaviour, and LA. The research question is posed:
“To what extent and how can we support students’ self-regulated learning of study behaviour with a learning analytics dashboard?”.
Chapter 2 focusses on LAD development over three phases: needs assessment, usability exploration, and perceived usefulness evaluation. This resulted in a final LAD version to be studied in following chapters.
Chapter 3 explores how internal feedback (i.e., new knowledge from a comparison) is generated within the appraisal phase of SRL, and reference frames’ influence on internal feedback generation.
Chapter 4 builds on Chapter 3 by exploring the LAD’s influence on the next SRL phases, the preparatory (where students set goals) and performance phase (where goals are performed). A peer reference frame’s effect on these phases was explored as well.
In Chapter 5, long-term LAD use effects were explored, whether LAD use elicited changes in study behaviour, whether changes in study behaviour related to changes in academic achievement, and if students initial study behaviour (i.e., before LAD use) influenced LAD use.
Chapter 6 summarizes findings from the included studies and presents overarching conclusions.
This dissertation’s results imply that the LAD partially supports’ students SRL. In Chapter 2, students stated that the LAD’s main use was gaining awareness and insight, aligning with the students in Chapter 5 using the LAD mostly to self-monitor. Results from Chapter 3 imply that internal feedback is generated from self-monitoring. Students generated internal feedback without a reference frame, but the most internal feedback was generated with a peer reference frame. In Chapter 4, students who set goals after LAD use mostly attained these goals, but students in Chapter 5 did not engage in goal-setting activities. This implies that the LAD can support students’ preparatory phase, but students may not set goals automatically. Chapter 5 also showed that LAD use did not influence study behaviour changes, and study behaviour changes did not influence changes in academic achievement. This may be due to students’ effort put into using the LAD, which was relatively low. This aligns with Chapter 2’s findings, where students stated that the LAD only impacts study behaviour if effort is put in. Future research could explore why students put a certain amount of effort into LAD use, and if external stimuli (e.g., an automatic prompt to set a goal) could increase LADs’ impact on study behaviour.