Seeing students at scale: how faculty in large lecture courses act upon learning analytics dashboard data

Despite their increasingly widespread adoption in post-secondary education, scholars and practitioners know very little about the impact of digital data displays on instructors’ sense-making and academic planning. In this manuscript, I report the results of comparative case studies of five different introductory physics instructors at three institutions who used data dashboards as part of an active learning approach called ‘Peer Instruction’. Instructors expressed frustration with the ways that data displays undermined their existing pedagogical strategies. They were stymied by a lack of clarity on how data is assembled and imbued with meaning, which limited their own sensemaking about the data. They also expressed concerns about how the dashboards facilitated data collection about their instructional planning and decision-making.