Designing for Success: Exploring the interplay between achievement goals and progress visualisation preferences in a learning analytics dashboard

Abstract

Student-facing learning analytics dashboards process and visualise learning traces to enable informed decision-making and goal-setting. Previous work contributes to understanding how to use feedback reference frames in designing these dashboards to cater to students with a mastery or performance achievement goal orientation. This study aimed to build upon this work by also investigating the interaction between feedback reference frames and an achievement goal orientation’s valance, i.e., approach or avoidance, and emphasising the need for progress indicators that are individualised to one’s achievement goal orientation. To this end, we created and evaluated four alternative dashboard designs of an existing learning analytics dashboard to cater to each achievement goal orientation in the framework by Elliot and McGregor. Results show limited significant effects in the evaluation scores by performance-approach and mastery-approach-oriented students to an upward social feedback reference frame and an absolute achievement feedback ref­erence frame, respectively. No effects were found for the achievement goals of negative valance. Considering methodological limitations and sample size, the findings indicate that while the con­ceptual distinction between approach and avoidance achievement goals is solid, understanding its implications in the design of learning analytics dashboards may prove difficult. It is important to understand and address these nuances in order to accommodate every learner effectively.