Teachers’ Noticing of data Presented by a Learning Analytic Tool

Teachers’ noticing refers to what teachers attend to and make sense of when interacting with their students during instruction, where they are simultaneously confronted with large amounts of information for which they must determine appropriate responses. Learning analytic tools interferes with teachers’ noticing. On one hand, the tools direct teachers’ attention to aspects in their students’ reasoning. On the other hand, teachers’ interpretations of the data provided by the tools depend on their custom noticing, shaped in former experiences.

We report a study of teachers’ noticing in relation to data presented by a learning analytics tool titled “GrouPer”. Based on big data (N>300) GrouPer clusters students’ responses to a set of problem items into groups who exhibit similar knowledge profiles and presents a dashboard that shows a projection of teachers’ own class on these clusters, accompanied with characterization of the profile.

We Interviewed 10 teachers who were provided with GrouPer dashboards regarding their students answers to a questionnaire on motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field. The interviews revealed teachers’ difficulty in noticing the unique information that the learning analytic tool presents.