Students’ positioning in data-driven learning: Data awareness, attitudes, and agency in the classroom

As digital data-collecting platforms become increasingly common in classrooms, schools face a dual mission of data education: supporting students in learning with data and in learning about data. To give students a voice in how this mission is realized, this study examined how they express awareness, attitudes, and agency in relation to their data-driven learning, using positioning theory as the interpretive lens. Interview accounts were gathered from 43 Finnish students (grades 4, 5, and 8) in three classes that regularly used a documentation and survey platform and a learning analytics platform. Through abductive analysis, polarized positionings in data awareness, attitudes, and agency were identified (e.g., ignorant-informed, indifferent-invested, passive-active). These were closely interconnected: for instance, limited awareness of data’s social relevance coincided with indifference and passivity, while emerging awareness sparked personal investment or strategic action. Synthesizing these patterns, four overarching “data positions” were conceptualized: detached/unaware, compliant/uncritical, tentative/sceptical, and strategic/informed. Each carries relevance and potential for data education, such as sustaining classroom routines with little reflection or, conversely, opening space for critical examinations of data. The present sample especially showed signs of less critical positionings: externally motivated and structured educational data practices had received little prior reflection from students, evoking trust, compliance, and nonchalance in their routineness. The findings suggest that realizing the dual mission of data education requires explicit pedagogy that makes educational data practices visible, empowers especially personally relevant uses of educational data, and legitimizes scepticism toward data as a teachable resource.