Showing Academic Performance Predictions during Term Planning: Effects on Students' Decisions, Behaviors, and Preferences
This addresses the problem of inefficient and subjective course selection for students, offering insights for designing better educational tools, though it is incremental in exploring framing effects.
The study investigated how showing grade predictions to students during course planning affects their decisions, behaviors, and preferences, finding that predictions can lead students to overly focus on maximizing performance at the expense of workload and that more specific predictions increase effort in course selection.
Course selection is a crucial activity for students as it directly impacts their workload and performance. It is also time-consuming, prone to subjectivity, and often carried out based on incomplete information. This task can, nevertheless, be assisted with computational tools, for instance, by predicting performance based on historical data. We investigate the effects of showing grade predictions to students through an interactive visualization tool. A qualitative study suggests that in the presence of predictions, students may focus too much on maximizing their performance, to the detriment of other factors such as the workload. A follow-up quantitative study explored whether these effects are mitigated by changing how predictions are conveyed. Our observations suggest the presence of a framing effect that induces students to put more effort into course selection when faced with more specific predictions. We discuss these and other findings and outline considerations for designing better data-driven course selection tools.