Understanding Teacher and Student Engagement
I analysed teacher and student activity data to examine how teacher engagement was associated with student usage and progress.
Context
Prowise Learn is an adaptive online learning platform for children aged 4–18, offering personalised exercises across subjects such as mathematics, Dutch and English. Teachers can use the platform to monitor student performance, manage learning activities and adjust the learning environment.
Problem
Prowise wanted to understand whether students with more active teachers used the platform more frequently and showed greater ability development than students with less active teachers. The central challenge was determining how teacher login behaviour related to student login frequency, activity and progress.
Approach
In a three-person consultancy team, we used two complementary approaches:
- We linked teacher login frequency to individual students’ login frequency, activity and ability growth.
- We analysed daily teacher and student activity patterns, including same-day and previous-day relationships, while accounting for time trends and differences between weekdays and weekends.
Results & insights
Students with more active teachers showed slightly higher login frequency and activity, but teacher login frequency explained little of the variation in student behaviour and was not clearly related to ability growth. Teacher and student engagement were strongly synchronised on the same day, even after accounting for weekly seasonality and time trends, while activity was lower during weekends.
These findings suggest that teacher logins may reflect monitoring behaviour rather than active intervention. Teachers may be checking student progress while students are already using the platform, instead of logging in primarily to assign games or adjust learning activities. However, because the available data did not capture what teachers did after logging in, this remains an interpretation rather than a confirmed conclusion. We therefore recommended examining more meaningful teacher behaviours, such as assigning activities, adjusting game settings, reviewing resources and monitoring student performance.