TY - JOUR TI - Increasing Students’ Awareness of Their Behavior in Online Learning Environments with Visualizations and Achievement Badges AU - Auvinen, Tapio AU - Hakulinen, Lasse AU - Malmi, Lauri T2 - IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies AB - 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. DA - 2015/07// PY - 2015 DO - 10.1109/TLT.2015.2441718 DP - IEEE Xplore VL - 8 IS - 3 SP - 261 EP - 273 SN - 1939-1382 KW - Adaptation models KW - Context KW - Data visualization KW - Education KW - Heating KW - Monitoring KW - Visualization KW - achievement badges KW - automatic assessment KW - computer aided instruction KW - computer science education KW - data visualisation KW - distance learning KW - educational courses KW - exercise solving KW - exercise submission KW - further education KW - gamification KW - goal orientation KW - heatmap visualization KW - human factors KW - online learning environment KW - performance avoidance KW - student awareness KW - student behavior KW - student reward KW - student study practice KW - student success prediction KW - teaching KW - teaching intervention KW - university-level computer science course ER -