Dashboard stories: How narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how the development and affordances of predictive analytics may impact how teachers and other educational actors think about and teach students and, more broadly, how society understands education. Our particular focus is on the data dashboards of learning support systems which are based on Machine Learning (ML). While previous research has focused on how these systems produce credible knowledge, we explore here how they also produce compelling, persuasive and convincing narratives. Our main argument is that particular kinds of stories are written by predictive analytics and written into their data dashboards. Based on a case study of a leading predictive analytics system, we explore how data dashboards imply causality between the ‘facts’ they are visualising. To do so, we analyse the stories they tell according to their spatial and temporal dimensions, characters and events, sequentiality as well as tellability. In the stories we identify, teachers are managers, students are at greater or lesser risk, and students’ sociality is reduced to machine-readable interactions. Overall, only data marked as individual behaviours becomes relevant to the system, rendering structural inequalities invisible. Reflecting on the implications of these systems, we suggest ways in which the uptake of these systems can interrupt such stories and reshape them in other directions.

The sociotechnical walkthrough – a methodological approach for platform studies

“…Regarding the focus of previous re search applying the approach, we high light two particular research gaps: 1) Algorithmic personalization has barely appeared on the research radar, despite datafication and algorithmization gaining sociopolitical importance (e. g., Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021). We therefore shift the theoretical focus to "media affordances" (Pentzold, Fraas, & Meier, 2013) in the fol lowing chapter, which is a concept from the socialsemiotic research perspective.…”

“…In this sense, the functional, propositional character of an object is understood as "a relationship that is socially and culturally constructed between the users and the artefact in the lived world" (Vyas, Chisalita, & van der Veer, 2006, p. 93). Applying the affordance concept to platforms, we assume that adaptive platforms have agency, because they not only map reality but reconfig ure practices, relationships and priorities (e. g., Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021). For ex ample, they convey certain messages, or chestrate and provide feedback to the user based on algorithmic personalization and machine learning.…”

What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? Three responses

“…Inequality is perpetuated when teachers in privileged schools and those in disadvantaged schools interpret students' digital practices very differently, with the former celebrating and the latter sanctioning what look like similar activities (Rafalow 2020). Inequality is perpetuated when predictive analytics dashboards shape stories about students' predicted future success or failure and thus lock students in traditionally socioeconomically disadvantaged areas out of educational achievement (Jarke and Macgilchrist 2021). In this way, edtech has become visible as a societal process that codes racialised, gendered, classed, religious, heteronormative, able-bodied norms into everyday educational practice.…”

Schools as Digital Figurations?

“…Die Kombination aus grösseren Datenmengen, schnelleren Prozessoren, effizienteren Algorithmen und den Potenzialen des sogenannten Maschinellen Lernens gestattet eine Beschleunigung und Verbreitung der Bewertungspraktiken weit über die zuvor bestehenden Verfahren hinaus. Gleichzeitig sind die Berechnungsverfahren von digitalen Bewertungssystemen (etwa Learning Analytics in Verbindung mit Maschinellem Lernen) in gewisser Weise opak und erschliessen sich den Nutzerinnen und Nutzern nicht unmittelbar (Ebner et al 2020;Jarke und Macgilchrist 2021).…”