Title:
The benefits and caveats of using clickstream data to understand student self-regulatory behaviors: opening the black box of learning processes
Authors:
Rachel Baker, Di Xu, Jihyun Park, Renzhe Yu, Qiujie Li, Bianca Cung, Christian Fischer, Fernando Rodriguez, Mark Warschauer & Padhraic Smyth
Published:
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 17(13), 2020
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00187-1
From the abstract:
"Student clickstream data—time-stamped records of click events in online courses—can provide fine-grained information about student learning. Such data enable researchers and instructors to collect information at scale about how each student navigates through and interacts with online education resources, potentially enabling objective and rich insight into the learning experience beyond self-reports and intermittent assessments. Yet, analyses of these data often require advanced analytic techniques, as they only provide a partial and noisy record of students’ actions. Consequently, these data are not always accessible or useful for course instructors and administrators. In this paper, we provide an overview of the use of clickstream data to define and identify behavioral patterns that are related to student learning outcomes."