A Learning Analytics Dashboard for K-12 English Teachers - Bridging the Gap Between Student Process Data and Teacher Needs

Educational technologies are being used more and more in secondary school settings. This increases the amount of students’ learning related data produced and stored. To keep up with this rise and to get most out of the collected data, teachers need digital tools that support and facilitate their pedagogical decision-making process. Learning analytics dashboards can be a good source to provide teachers with necessary insights into their students’ learning processes. However, for such tools to be effective and actionable, they have to be aligned with teachers’ needs and thus, provide and visualize data in a concise and structured way. We therefore conducted a survey study with 11 English teachers from K-12 secondary schools in Germany who evaluated the assumed usefulness of possible dashboard features. Based on these findings, we developed a teacher dashboard incorporating the most desired functionalities, such as a quickly accessible summary of strengths, weaknesses and support needs, or an overview of current misconceptions and competencies alongside additional metrics in order to support multiple teaching practices. The implementation and the underlying calculations are described, focusing on the importance of learners’ process data to provide teachers with a detailed and revealing view on their students’ and class learning states. In an evaluation study of the dashboard’s prototype with mock data, teachers (n=6) gave high ratings for the dashboard’s usability.