Expansive Actionable Learning Analytics for Schools: Challenges and Opportunities

The use of actionable learning analytics (ALA) to improve educational outcomes is now an established field although its use has been more prevalent in higher education contexts than in schools for both pragmatic and practical reasons. Within the K-12 context ALA has had a mixed response with researchers (e.g., Catherine et al., 2024; Laura et al., 2022) reporting some educators open to the educational benefits of ALA while others remain unconvinced and/or concerned by potentially harmful impacts such as data misinterpretation or privacy infringement. Bond et al. (2023) identified that while ALA has strong potential to increase students’ engagement in their learning there is little compelling evidence to suggest that this has occurred in practice. Perhaps this dissonance between potentiality and actuality is due to differences in pedagogical aims or philosophical incongruences between researchers and educators or perhaps there is something more fundamentally different about K-12 education. In the last decade, the volume and breadth of student data available to educators and researchers in the K-12 school context has grown to such an extent that it has become both a treasure trove and an ethical minefield. While the ethics of ALA have always been an area for active research (e.g., Abelardo et al., 2014; Sharon et al., 2013) concerns around the use of data in schools, where students cannot generally provide legally binding informed consent, are often amplified. Combining this with the potential risk for harm (Andrea & Andrea, 2020; Willis et al., 2016) leads to a situation where schools are not always willing or able to share data with researchers in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, if researchers are to bring the ALA field to its potential, there needs to be a shift towards understanding learning environments, not as a collection of independent processes, but as a complex, integrated holistic system (see Dawson et al., 2019). 

This half-day, collaborative workshop will guide up to 40 participants through a series of structured roundtable discussions to explore some of the challenges that are unique to this learning context and to delve into possible approaches to solutions. All participants with a research or implementation interest in LA in schools, regardless of level of experience, are encouraged to attend and share their observations, insights, and perspectives.

Participants will be divided randomly to form roundtable discussion groups of around 8 participants. Working from a prompting question, each roundtable will follow a protocol that ensures each participant gets an equal voice in the conversation and that no one idea or agenda can dominate the discussion. At the end of each roundtable insights and key ideas from each group will be shared more broadly with the workshop group and discussed. The roundtable groups will be shuffled between rounds of activities to ensure that as many perspectives as possible are captured in the discussions

Finally, a rapid protocol based on the Delphi method (Dalkey, 1969) will be adopted to discern, rank, and gain consensus on the participants' views around the three most pressing research themes in need of investigation in order to expand the utility of ALA in the K-12 context. The findings of this workshop will be shared on the workshop mini-site and will inform the writing of a position paper to be submitted to the Journal of Learning Analytics or another suitable journal. All participants will have the option to contribute to this paper's writing.