From Theory to Interface: Operationalising Frameworks in the Design of Learning Analytics Dashboards

Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) have been widely adopted in higher education to support academic engagement and provide pedagogical interventions. Despite persistent calls for theory‐driven design to ensure that LADs provide meaningful support to students, a significant gap remains in the existing literature regarding how theories and frameworks are operationalised within LAD features to promote actionable insights and pedagogical interventions. While existing studies generally acknowledge the importance of theory, they nevertheless remain at the theory level, merely recommending theoretical perspectives without offering concrete guidelines for their translation into dashboard design elements. The study was conducted with the aim of systematically examining how theories and frameworks have been operationalised in the design of LADs to support tertiary students. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses (PRISMA) approach was used to retrieve 35 peer‐reviewed papers from six academic databases. These were then analysed. In contrast to earlier studies, the study revealed learning theories to be used to a large degree in LAD design, complemented by motivational, perception and user experience theories as well as LAD‐specific design frameworks. A comprehensive analysis of the operationalisation of these theories and frameworks highlights key gaps and points to valuable implications for the design of future LADs.