Improving Student Performance Using Nudge Analytics

Providing students with continuous and personalized feedback on their performance is an important part of encouraging self regulated learning. As part of our higher education platform, we built a set of data visualizations to provide feedback to students on their assignment performance. These visualizations give students information about how they are doing compared to the rest of the class, and allow them to compare the time they spent on assignments across their courses. Included in the feedback are ‘nudges’ which provide guidance on how students might improve their performance by adjusting when they start or submit assignments. In order to understand what nudges to provide to students, we analyzed historical data from over 1.4 million students on over 27 million assignment submissions to find student performance trends. The data confirmed that student performance significantly decreases when assignments are started on the same day they are due and when they are submitted after the due date. We used these findings and the past and current performance of each student to display nudges relevant for them in their visualizations, highlighting actionable strategies for improving future performance.