Investigating student motivation in the context of a learning analytics intervention during a summer bridge program

• Some features of the bridge program moderately affected students’ goal orientations.
• Students’ perceptions of their goals and performance were strongly related to changes in their motivation.
• There is a complex relationship between advisors’ use of an early warning system and struggling students’ academic success.

Summer bridge programs are designed to improve retention and academic success among at-risk populations in postsecondary education by focusing on successful skills, behaviors, and high impact practices that promote academic performance. Recent research on these programs has focused primarily on how students’ incoming demographics and prior academic performance predict academic performance at the university level. This study investigated changes in students’ academic motivation orientations over the course of one bridge program, and how a learning analytics-based intervention was employed by academic advisors to inform their face-to-face meetings with students. The results of our study show that students’ mastery orientation decreased over the course of the bridge program, and indicate that students’ exposure to displays of their academic performance negatively predicts this change. The findings suggest that student perceptions of their goals and formative performance need to be carefully considered in the design of learning analytics interventions since the resulting tools can affect students’ interpretations of their own data as well as their subsequent academic success.