Increasing Students’ Awareness of Their Behavior in Online Learning Environments with Visualizations and Achievement Badges

Resource type
Journal Article
Authors/contributors
Title
Increasing Students’ Awareness of Their Behavior in Online Learning Environments with Visualizations and Achievement Badges
Abstract
In online learning environments where automatic assessment is used, students often resort to harmful study practices such as procrastination and trial-and-error. In this paper, we study two teaching interventions that were designed to address these issues in a university-level computer science course. In the first intervention, we used achievement badges, a form of gamification, to reward students for submitting early, solving exercises with few iterations, and completing the exercises with full points. In the second intervention, we used heatmap visualizations that show a prediction of the student's success if he or she continues to behave in the same way, based on data from earlier courses. The results from a controlled experiment show that the heatmap visualizations had an impact on how early the students submitted their exercises and how many points they earned from them. We also observed that performance approach goal orientation correlated with an interest towards the achievement badges whereas performance avoidance correlated with an interest towards the visualizations. The results indicate that increasing students' awareness of their behavior can have a positive impact on their study practices and results. However, the same type of feedback may not suit all students because of individual differences.
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
Volume
8
Issue
3
Pages
261-273
Date
July 2015
ISSN
1939-1382
Library Catalogue
IEEE Xplore
Extra
Conference Name: IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies shortDOI: 10/f7sgzz
Citation
Auvinen, T., Hakulinen, L., & Malmi, L. (2015). Increasing Students’ Awareness of Their Behavior in Online Learning Environments with Visualizations and Achievement Badges. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 8(3), 261–273. https://doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2015.2441718