Implementing learning analytics interventions to support student agency in knowledge building
Research and development of Learning Analytics (LA) have created new ways to support students’ learning. However, our understanding of teachers’ roles when implementing LA in classroom practices remains nascent. This study investigates how teachers can implement LA to support students’ agency in directing their own inquiry, when engaging in a digital pedagogy approach known as Knowledge Building (KB) on an online platform called Knowledge Forum (KF). Together with a teacher experienced in KB and KF, we co-constructed interventions anchored on two easy-to-use LA tools in KF, the Scaffold Tracker and Word Cloud. These LA interventions were enacted with a Grade 5 class of 18 students and another Grade 6 class of 18 students. Three teacher roles were identified: detecting behaviour unproductive to collaboration, mediating between LA and student self-assessment, and framing student-generated lines of inquiry in actionable ways. We coded KF notes for the discourse moves they reflected and found that after the teacher implemented the LA interventions, notes that sustained inquiry increased sharply with students’ focus shifting from individual to collective knowledge and from superficial explanations to deep understandings. We discuss the implications of these findings on the development of ways to bridge LA research and practice.
A knowledge building approach to primary science collaborative inquiry supported by learning analytics
This case study explores how a science teacher adopted knowledge building and learning analytics to support a class of primary five students to collaboratively inquire and learn about electricity. Specifically, we aim to understand how the teacher implemented a lesson design guided by knowledge building principles of idea improvement and community knowledge and how he used visualisations from an analytics tool to facilitate students in collaborative inquiry in science. We collected student notes from their online discourse in Knowledge Forum, video-recorded a total of 11 lesson videos and conducted interviews with the teacher and students. We found that students’ online discussion reflected explanation-seeking questions to sustain the inquiry on the topic and explanations to deepen and improve their ideas on concepts of electricity. We also found that the visualisations from our analytics tool supported (i) teacher-facilitated whole-class discussions on curriculum keywords and student ideas to develop conceptual understanding and idea-building, and (ii) students in exploring science ideas they were interested in. The findings from our study contribute to the understanding of teachers’ enactment of inquiry-supported pedagogies in primary science classrooms.