Supporting students’ confidence judgement through visualising alignment in open learner models

Supporting students’ knowledge monitoring skills, a component of metacognition, can help students regulate their own learning. This thesis investigates the alignment of learners’ confidence in their knowledge with a computer’s assessment of their knowledge, visualised using an Open Learner Model (OLM). The research explored students’ preferred method for visualising inconsistent data (e.g. misalignment) in an OLM, and the ways in which visualising alignment can influence student interaction with the computer. The thesis demonstrates that visualising alignment in Open Learner Models signifi-cantly increases students’ confidence compared to a control condition. In particular, visualising alignment benefited low-achieving students, in terms of knowledge monitoring and this was associated with improvements in their performance. Students showed a preference towards the visualisations that provides an overview of the in-formation (i.e. opacity) rather than ones, which provide detailed information. Graph-ical representation is shown to be more beneficial in motivating students to interact with the system than text-based representation of the same information in the con-text of representing the alignment within OLMs