Supporting Self-Reflection and Educators: Towards a Digital Pedometer for Learning

Students often have little insight into their learning effort and progress. This is particularly an issue for learning that occurs outside of digital systems such as working on paper-based exercise sheets. Valuable information about the learning process is neither tracked nor evaluated systematically. This hinders students’ self-regulated learning and also educators’ abilities to intervene or adapt to student needs. A solution may be to actively involve students in collecting learning data themselves, however, it is still unclear what students need and how to motivate them. This paper provides insights from interviews with students on self-tracking to support their learning progress in non-digital environments. A concept of a digital tool is explored by discussing design principles, key features, and potential benefits of tracking students' learning activities. Two main features were suggested to show progress – time-tracking and self-assessment. Incentives like gamification features are also discussed.