Teacher dashboards to support primary school students’ SRL skills

Developing self-regulation skills (SRL) is essential for learners. SRL involves various skills such as goal setting, self-monitoring and self-reflection. While adaptive learning technologies in primary schools help students practice math by adjusting difficulty, students must still monitor accuracy and select effort levels. Teachers play a critical role in supporting SRL development but often struggle to monitor students’ regulation and progress. This project provides teachers with visualizations of students’ regulation processes to enhance instruction, aiming to improve student learning and SRL skills. This project highlights the interplay between technology and teachers in fostering SRL.

Background

Developing self-regulation skills is essential for learners. Self-regulated learning (SRL) refers to a student's ability to understand and control their learning environment. Self-regulation abilities include goal setting, self-monitoring, and self-reflection.

Students don't develop these skills by themselves: teachers and technologies can play a critical role. Many children in primary schools practice math using adaptive learning technologies. Even though these technologies support learners by adapting to the difficulty of problems, the students are still required to monitor accuracy and select the appropriate level of effort. Teachers therefore still play an integral role in supporting students’ development of SRL. For teachers, it is often difficult to accurately monitor students’ regulation during learning and the development of SRL over time.

In this project, we will offer teachers visualizations of students’ regulation processes. We will examine whether the dashboards enhance teachers’ instruction practices and whether that, in turn, will lead to increased student learning and SRL skills. The project concerns the interplay between support offered to students by technology and teachers and therefore is of high relevance both for the development of educational technology and for teachers’ practices in supporting students’ SRL skills.

Hypotheses.

We expect that teachers who use the SRL dashboard will provide more targeted and effective instruction on SRL strategies, which in turn, is expected to improve students' SRL.

Evaluation methods.

The project started with the iterative co-design of a teacher dashboard, integrating theory and practice to develop initial prototypes using different interview techniques. In the second phase, these prototypes were tested to assess their impact on improving teachers' planned instruction of SRL strategies. The third phase involves evaluating the use of the dashboards in real classroom settings through observations. Finally, a classroom experiment will be conducted to examine the influence of the dashboard on teaching practices and student outcomes.

Preliminary results.

From the first round of teacher interviews, we developed initial teacher dashboard prototypes. In the second round, teachers evaluated the clarity and actionability of the dashboard information, guiding the creation of an improved prototype. We are now analyzing results from our second study, which tested two dashboard versions: a mirroring version and one providing SRL advice. Preliminary results showed a significant positive influence of the advising version on teachers' planned strategy instruction.

Future plans.

In the upcoming study, we are planning to test the last version of our prototypes in the primary school classrooms using adaptive learning technologies (Gynzy).