Schooled by Dashboards?: Learning Platforms’ Performance-Centered Pedagogy and Its Impact on Teaching

Abstract

Personalized learning is rapidly becoming a reality in classrooms worldwide through platformization. At the classroom level, digital platforms shape learning toward personal needs through pedagogies encoded into their design—their algorithms, but also into dashboard interfaces teachers increasingly employ as part of their educational toolkit. This study investigates how dashboards can impact teaching in primary school classrooms by examining how their data visualizations configure particular views on learning, which educators increasingly depend on to make pedagogical decisions. It will address two research questions: What are the pedagogical underpinnings of learning dashboards integrated in personalized learning technologies? How may pedagogies encoded into these dashboards affect teaching? To answer these questions, the chapter will start by setting out a theoretical perspective on platform pedagogy. Subsequently, it will describe teaching and learning relationships encoded in the teaching dashboard of the Dutch adaptive learning platform Snappet and argue that its pedagogy of performativity may disempower teachers’ control over learning. The concluding section will discuss actions needed to strengthen schools’ and teachers’ control over the pedagogical dimensions of learning platforms.