Showing Academic Performance Predictions during Term Planning: Effects on Students' Decisions, Behaviors, and Preferences

TL;DR

This paper examines how displaying academic performance predictions influences students' course selection decisions, behaviors, and preferences, highlighting the importance of framing and visualization in designing effective decision-support tools.

Contribution

It investigates the impact of performance predictions on student decision-making and proposes design considerations for improving data-driven course selection tools.

Findings

Predictions can cause students to focus excessively on performance maximization.

Changing how predictions are presented can mitigate some negative effects.

Specific framing of predictions increases students' effort in course selection.

Abstract

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.