Moving Towards Mastery: Learning Dashboards and Persistence in Digital Courseware

The vast amount of data collected during online learning offers opportunities to advance newer interventions that might aid learning. One such intervention has been learning analytics dashboards, visualizations designed to translate learning-related data into usable information. However, many student-facing dashboards compare learners’ performance against their peers rather than against task mastery. This study examined the relationship between learners’ perceptions of progress feedback from mastery-oriented learning dashboards and their likelihood to persist in an online homework activity. 77 undergraduate nursing students answered surveys before and after a learning activity in one of three digital adaptive systems, each of which had its own embedded dashboard. Hierarchical linear regression analysis indicated that perceptions of dashboard feedback explained 19% of the variance in learners’ expressed likelihood to persist, after taking into account achievement orientation, differences in the online systems, and perceptions of non-dashboard feedback. The results of the study suggest that mastery-oriented learning dashboards show promise as a potential motivational aid to learners.