Feedback practices with teacher dashboards in primary education: Exploring dashboard-prompted feedback across lesson phases

Abstract

In primary education, adaptive learning technologies (ALTs) personalise tasks and provide teacher dashboards that visualise real-time student performance and progress. These dashboards can help teachers to provide targeted, real-time feedback based on the dashboard data, a practice known as dashboard-prompted feedback (DP-feedback). This study examined how teachers give different types of DP-feedback (task, process, metacognitive, social, and personal) across different lesson phases (e.g., instruction, guided practice, independent practice). We observed 25 teachers giving dashboard-supported mathematics lessons in primary education. Using visualised behavioural clustering, we analysed the distribution of teachers' DP-feedback across lesson phases. Our results showed that DP-feedback mainly consisted of task and process feedback and was mostly provided in the later phases of the lessons. Three clusters of DP-feedback were identified: feedback provided in one, two, or three lesson phases. No significant relationship was found between the type of feedback and the number of lesson phases in which DP-feedback was given. In addition, we explored the relationship between the clusters and teacher characteristics. Overall, teachers' dashboard use differed primarily in when DP-feedback was enacted across lesson phases, rather than in which feedback types were used, highlighting the relevance of phase-sensitive support and technology-specific experience.