A systematic narrative review of learning analytics research in K-12 and schools

Abstract

The field of learning analytics emerged in the last decade to take advantage of the increasing availability of data about learners that digital systems generate. Existing research in learning analytics has focused on higher education, as this context often relies heavily on digital platforms such as online learning management systems, making data collection easier. In this paper, we focus on LA research in the context of elementary level teaching. We provide a systematic narrative review in which we analyze the articles that had the most impact in the field. Our results show the existence of some recurring themes such as gamification and multimodal methods. We make a distinction between papers in which learning analytics is the target of the study (e.g., dashboards) and papers in which learning analytics methods were used as a means to study a given behavior/skill/phenomenon (e.g., problem-solving skills). Lastly, we found that most studies lack a strong theoretical foundation on education science and, thus, there is a need to develop more elaborated theoretical perspectives in future research on school-level learning analytics, as well as papers that deliver a real impact on learning and teaching. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)