Fostering 21st century literacies through a collaborative critical reading and learning analytics environment: user-perceived benefits and problematics

Abstract

The affordances of learning analytics (LA) are being increasingly harnessed to enhance 21st century (21C) pedagogy and learning. Relatively rare, however, are use cases and empirically based understandings of students' actual experiences with LA tools and environments at fostering 21C literacies, especially in secondary schooling and Asian education contexts. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by 1) presenting a first iteration design of a computer-supported collaborative critical reading and LA environment and its 16-week implementation in a Singapore high school; and 2) foregrounding students' quantitative and qualitative accounts of the benefits and problematics associated with this learning innovation. We focus the analytic lens on the LA dashboard components that provided visualizations of students' reading achievement, 21C learning dispositions, critical literacy competencies and social learning network positioning within the class. The paper aims to provide insights into the potentialities, paradoxes and pathways forward for designing LA that take into consideration the voices of learners as critical stakeholders.