Social Comparison in Education Interfaces: Leaderboards and Progress Indicators

Abstract

Student-facing learning analytics dashboards have led to providing actionable feedback to the students through visualizations like charts and progress indicators. Some of these visualizations allow students to compare themselves with their peers. The impact of such comparitive visualizations has been researched in the past few decades and most of the works have produced conflicting evidence. Leaderboards, or comparitive charts have been utilized to motivate students. These create competition that can influence the students positively or negatively. The influence of learning interfaces that combine leaderboards and progress indicators has not been thoroughly explored. This study aims to describe the behavior of students on an online learning dashboard featuring multiple social comparison elements, specifically progress indicators, and leaderboards.

We designed a dashboard, containing progress indicators and leaderboards, that was used by the students in a university course. Interactions with the dashboard were tracked throughout the course and were used to showcase differences in behavior between the students. Interpersonal differences among the students were captured through validated questionnaires, and clusters of students were further explored to analyze the patterns of their usage and engagement with the system. We also examined the students who used the system more seriously and classified them as learners. We found that clusters based on personality differences did show significantly different interactions on the dashboard. These differences were the most noticeable in their interactions with the leaderboard. However, no significant differences could be found between the learners who actively performed interactions that indicated self-reflection compared to those who didn’t. Pre-knowledge of the student also didn’t seem to be an important factor in determining the engagement and interactions of the students. We infer that the tendency to compare with the peers, as well as goal orientation are among the important factors that decide students’ engagement with progress indicators and leaderboards. This study highlights the need for future research on the influence of individual differences on online learning dashboards that contain multiple social comparison elements.