Students’ perceptions of, and emotional responses to, personalised learning analytics-based feedback: an exploratory study of four courses

Research and development in learning analytics has established viable solutions for scaling personalised feedback to all students. However, questions remain regarding how such feedback is perceived, interpreted and acted upon by stakeholders. The present study reports on the analysis of focus group data from four courses to understand students’ sensemaking of personalised, learning analytics-based feedback. Deductive analysis and epistemic network analysis were carried out to identify students’ perceptions and associated emotional responses to the feedback. The results demonstrate that students mostly held positive perceptions of their feedback – especially in regard to quality, task-focus and instructor care. While emotions to feedback were often negative, students also noted this increased their motivation to invest more effort in the learning tasks. The results of the study provide further evidence of the interpersonal communication variables influencing students’ proactive recipience of feedback. Importantly, the findings show that students were mostly actively engaged with their personalised feedback, and that the instructor-mediated approach to feedback based on learning analytics is aligned to the principles of effective feedback.