A Literature Study of Visual Analysis in an Educational Context

Abstract

Research Full Paper - Visual Analytics is an emerging field that enables detection of the expected and discovery of the unexpected. This technique has been used in numerous areas such as education, where the motivation is to understand and improve the teaching and learning processes. This paper presents a systematic literature study of the field of visual analysis in an educational context in order to provide more insights into this research area. Therefore, 128 papers were related to this topic. The majority of them were developed in the United States, although Spain, China, the United Kingdom and Brazil are in the ranking of countries that published the most. According to this literature study, 72% of the found papers were published after 2015, showing that Visual Learning Analytics is an emerging field, also, there are several conferences that have included this topic in their publications. Additional analyses were made, focusing on the discovery of the most used algorithms, which include bar charts, line charts, pie charts, Heatmap, and others; whether data mining is commonly combined with Visual Learning Analytics; which educational level is most analyzed in the literature: high school, undergraduate or graduate; and whether any subject has more approaches as well as whether the initial computing classes have been analyzed.