Enacting control with student dashboards: The role of motivation.

Background: Even though monitoring and control enactment are key aspects of self‐regulated learning (SRL), Adaptive learning technologies (ALTs) may reduce the need for learners to monitor and control their learning. Personalized dashboards are effective in supporting learners' monitoring and can potentially support control behaviour. Allowing learners to enact control over their learning process, seems to hold potential for increasing their motivation. Objectives: Therefore, this study's aim was to investigate the relation between control enactment and motivation. We examined how learners enacted control while learning with an ALT with personalized dashboards and examined the relation between learners' enactment of control and their motivation. Methods: Seventy‐eight primary school learners (Grade 5) participated. During the lesson, learners worked on mathematics in the ALT and concurrently were shown personalized visualizations that supported monitoring and enacting control over their learning process. Learners could enact control to change problems' difficulty to easy, medium, or hard. Motivation was measured before and after learning. Results: The SEM analyses showed that how learners enacted control was related to their motivation. Choosing difficult problems was related to more enjoyment and competence while choosing easy problems related to more pressure and tension. Learners who complied with the suggested difficulty level experienced less choice, but also less pressure/tension and more enjoyment and competence. Conclusions: These results provide avenues to account for broader learner characteristics like SRL and motivation to optimize learning. This way, hybrid systems in which control enactment is a shared responsibility of the system and learner, can be improved to support SRL development. Lay Description: What is currently known: Monitor and control enactment are key aspects of self‐regulated learning (SRL).Adaptive learning technologies may reduce the need for learners to monitor and control their learning.Personalized dashboards support learners' monitoring behaviour and can potentially also support control enactment.Enactment of control could positively affect learners' motivation. What does this paper add: There is a large variation in how learners enact control and whether they comply with the scaffold.Learners who chose more difficult problems experienced more enjoyment, while learners choosing easy problems, experienced more pressure.Learners complied with the scaffold, experienced less choice, but also less pressure and more enjoyment.This study provides avenues to account for broader learner characteristics like SRL and motivation to optimize learning. Practical implications: Support control enactment by actively involve learners in choice during the learning process.Offer monitor and enactment in conjunction, as learners can only make well‐founded choices if they can monitor their learning process.Intrinsically and extrinsically motivated learners showed different choice patterns and learning experience.It is important to have an understanding and monitoring of learners' motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]