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

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.