Self-regulation and emotion matter: A case study of instructor interactions with a learning analytics dashboard

Abstract

Learning analytics (LA) is providing new methodologies that are being applied to the design and application of dashboards to support teaching and learning. However, few studies attempt to understand how instructors interact with an LA dashboard and how self-regulated learning (SRL) activities and emotions of instructors occur and co-occur in the interaction. The current study investigates ten instructors’ SRL activities and epistemic emotions by analyzing the screen capture videos and think-aloud data while they interact with an LA dashboard designed to support the online asynchronous collaboration of multiple groups. The results reveal that instructors demonstrated two ways of navigating LA dashboards, and they relied heavily on the conversation explorer feature. Instructors were mostly engaged in elaboration, monitoring, and evaluation activities and they frequently experienced confusion and enjoyment. Expert instructors were more likely to refer to their personal teaching experience and demonstrated more epistemic emotions than novice instructors. This study contributes to the literature on SRL and teacher emotions by revealing the critical role of elaboration, monitoring, evaluation, and epistemic emotions when instructors attempt to understand a LA dashboard by themselves. These findings highlight the importance of providing pedagogical assistance to teachers who are trying to navigate between group dynamics and visualizations viewed using LA dashboards.