Learning analytics in practice

Abstract

Even though the recent influx of tablets in primary education goes together with the vision that educational technology empowered with learning analytics will revolutionize education, empirical results supporting this claim are scares. Adaptive educational technology Snappet combines extracted and embedded learning analytics daily in classrooms. While students make exercises on the tablet this technology displays real-time data of learner performance in a teacher dashboard (extracted analytics). At the same time, learner performance is used to adaptively adjust exercises to students' progress (embedded analytics). This quasiexperimental study compares the development of students' arithmetic skills over one schoolyear (grade 2 and 4) in a traditional paper based setting to learning with the adaptive educational technology Snappet. The results indicate that students in the Snappet condition make significantly more progress on arithmetic skills in grade 4. Moreover, in this grade students with a high ability level, benefit the most from working with this adaptive educational technology. Overall the development pattern of students with different abilities was more divergent in the AET condition compared to the control condition. These results indicate that adaptive educational technologies combining extracted and embedded learning analytics are indeed creating new education scenarios that contribute to personalized learning in primary education.