Teacher dashboard design for self-regulated learning: a participatory approach

Abstract Developing self-regulated learning (SRL) is essential for students to ensure lifelong learning in a changing world. As students often do not develop SRL skills independently, teachers play a crucial role in nurturing these skills through metacognitive feedback. To provide this type of feedback, teachers need an accurate assessment of students’ metacognition. Teachers gain valuable insights from dashboards, but these dashboards often lack students’ metacognitive indicators. Therefore, this study engaged in a participatory design approach with primary school teachers to design an SRL teacher dashboard. The goals were to (1) identify teachers’ needs for information regarding primary school students’ metacognitive indicators, and (2) design an SRL teacher dashboard that analyzes, organizes, and presents this information. Two design rounds were conducted: focus groups gathered preferences from 19 educational professionals regarding metacognitive indicators and interface features, followed by a questionnaire administered to 45 primary school teachers to further refine these indicators and features, guiding the design of the SRL teacher dashboard. In our findings, teachers expressed a need for metacognitive indicators in the goal setting, enactment, and adaptations phases of the COPES model, while giving less priority to the task definition phase. Regarding dashboard interface, teachers valued personalization options, along with additional information (e.g. students’ growth by grade), and clarity for quick data overview. The present study reveals primary school teachers’ need for metacognitive indicators and exemplifies how participatory design can integrate COPES phases and teacher input to design an SRL teacher dashboard, effectively merging theoretical frameworks into practical classroom tools.