Why trace data fail to inform learning outcomes

To be successful in higher education students need to self-regulate their learning processes. As students often possess the required strategies but do not use them, prompts are considered to be helpful to motivate students applying strategies. This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of prompting self-regulated learning strategies on a transfer test including learning behavior indicated by trace data. Findings indicate that mainly study-related characteristics are predicting learning outcome, and that trace data are only limitedly capable of informing learning outcome in small data sets. Future research should further investigate the capacities of learning analytics for predicting learning outcome and supporting learning processes using experimental settings with larger cohorts. In addition, the role of the tutor as mediator between learning analytics results and provided interventions need to be investigated