Human-Centered Design of a Dashboard on Students’ Revisions During Writing

Abstract

Learning dashboards are often used to provide teachers with insight into students’ learning processes. However, simply providing teachers with data on students’ learning processes is not necessarily beneficial for improving learning and teaching; the data need to be actionable. Recently, human-centered learning analytics has been suggested as a solution to realize more effective and actionable dashboards. Accordingly, this study aims to identify how these human-centered approaches could be used to design an interpretable and actionable learning dashboard on students’ writing processes. The design consists of three iterative steps. First, visualizations on students’ revision process, created from keystroke data, were evaluated with writing researchers. Second, the updated visualizations were used to co-design a paper prototype of the dashboard within a focus group session with writing teachers. Finally, the paper prototype was transformed into a digital prototype and evaluated by teachers in individual user test interviews. The results showed that this approach was useful for designing an interpretable dashboard with envisioned actions, which could be further tested in classroom settings.