Abstract
Study success includes the successful completion of a first degree in higher education to the largest extent, and the successful completion of individual learning tasks to the smallest extent. Factors affecting study success range from individual dispositions (e.g., motivation, prior academic performance) to characteristics of the educational environment (e.g., attendance, active learning, social embeddedness). Recent developments in learning analytics, which are a socio-technical data mining and analytic practice in educational contexts, show promise in enhancing study success in higher education, through the collection and analysis of data from learners, learning processes, and learning environments in order to provide meaningful feedback and scaffolds when needed. This research reports a systematic review focusing on empirical evidence, demonstrating how learning analytics have been successful in facilitating study success in continuation and completion of students’ university courses. Using standardised steps of conducting a systematic review, an initial set of 6220 articles was identified. The final sample includes 46 key publications. The findings obtained in this systematic review suggest that there are a considerable number of learning analytics approaches which utilise effective techniques in supporting study success and students at risk of dropping out. However, rigorous, large-scale evidence of the effectiveness of learning analytics in supporting study success is still lacking. The tested variables, algorithms, and methods collected in this systematic review can be used as a guide in helping researchers and educators to further improve the design and implementation of learning analytics systems.
Highlights
To date, the study of learning analytics has tended to evolve exponentially from the early 2010s in the areas of education and psychology, as well as computing and data science (Prieto et al 2019)
There have been a number of research efforts, some of which focused on various learning analytics tools (Atif et al 2013), some on practices (Sclater et al 2016) and policies (Tsai et al 2018), and some, which related to learning analytics system adoption at school-level, within higher education institutions, and at national level (Buckingham Shum and McKay 2018; Ifenthaler 2017)
Rigorous large-scale evidence to support the effectiveness of learning analytics in supporting study success is still lacking (Ifenthaler 2017; Ifenthaler et al 2019)
Summary
The study of learning analytics has tended to evolve exponentially from the early 2010s in the areas of education and psychology, as well as computing and data science (Prieto et al 2019). While the concept of learning analytics is vaguely defined, it sees a plethora of conceptual variations, including school analytics (Sergis and Sampson 2016), teacher or teaching analytics (Sergis and Sampson 2017), academic analytics (Long and Siemens 2011), assessment analytics (Nouira et al 2019), social learning analytics (Buckingham Shum and Ferguson 2012), or multimodal learning analytics (Blikstein and Worsley 2016) For this systematic literature review with a specific focus on learning analytics in higher education and its link to study success, learning analytics are defined as “the use, assessment, elicitation and analysis of static and dynamic information about learners and learning environments, for the near real-time modelling, prediction and optimisation of learning processes, and learning environments, as well as for educational decision-making” There are initial systematic reviews on learning analytics, such as on policy recommendations for learning analytics (Ferguson et al 2016), identification of learning analytics research objectives and challenges (Papamitsiou and Economides 2014), learning analytics in the context of distance education (Kilis and Gulbahar 2016), and more recently on the efficiency of learning analytics interventions (Larrabee Sønderlund et al 2018), there exists no current and comprehensive systematic review focusing on learning analytics for supporting study success
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