A visualization of decision-making

Seed project: The Role of Narratives in Teachers' Learning Analytics-Based Decision-Making: A Pilot Study

Data-based educational decision-making means teachers use student data insights to make professional decisions. In this pilot project, we develop an empirical method to investigate the role of teachers' narrative knowledge in professional decision-making.

Project information

Project manager
Corrado Matta
Other project members
Thomas Nordström, Italo Masiello
Financier
Linnaeus Knowledge Environement: Education in Change
Timetable
1 jan 2025–31 dec 2025
Subject
Pedagogy, computer science (Department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Social Sciences)

More about the project

A hypothesis that pervades the digitization of the school sector is that more and better data about students would increase teachers' ability to make well-informed pedagogical decisions. This idea is the basis of teachers' use of so-called Visual Learning Analytics (VLA), i.e. digital tools that visualize student data about, for example, student activities, attendance, and use of digital teaching aids. However, the hypothesis misses an important aspect: digital student data such as VLA is only one piece of the puzzle in teachers' professional decision-making.

Digital student data is not the only thing that forms the basis of teachers' pedagogical decisions, but should be seen as one of several tools in professional decision-making. By professional decision-making, we mean all situations in which a teacher needs to use his skills to assess a student's situation or choose to act in a certain way. For example, it may be about assessing the student's chance of reaching a learning goal, deciding whether the student needs extra effort, or whether the guardians should be contacted and informed about the situation.

In professional decision-making, the teacher uses several different types of knowledge, for example about the student's school situation and social situation, but also about previous experiences of similar situations. We look at the teachers' way of putting different knowledge together as stories or narratives. Visualizations can only support teachers' work if they fit into a story about the student and the decision. In other words, professional decision-making is like a puzzle, where all the pieces must fit together to give a clear picture of which decision is the best in the situation.

In this pilot project, we develop and test an empirical method to study to what extent and in what way different professional knowledge is involved in teachers' use of VLA for assessment and decision-making. Thus, the pilot focuses on designing an experiment and an empirical test to measure the interaction between these different sources of knowledge.

The project is part of the research in Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Education in Change, and the research groups:

Staff