Socio-Spatial Learning Analytics in Co-located Collaborative Learning Spaces: A Systematic Literature Review

Socio-spatial learning analytics (SSLA) is an emerging area within learning analytics research that seeks to uncover valuable educational insights from individuals' social and spatial data traces. These traces are captured automatically through sensing technologies in physical learning spaces, and the research is commonly based on the theoretical foundations of social constructivism and cultural anthropology. With its growing empirical basis, a systematic literature review is timely in order to provide educational researchers and practitioners with a detailed summary of the emerging works and the opportunities enabled by SSLA. This paper presents a systematic review of 25 peer-reviewed articles on SSLA published between 2011 and 2023. Descriptive, network, and thematic analyses were conducted to identify the citation networks, essential components, opportunities, and challenges enabled by SSLA. The findings illustrated that SSLA provides the opportunity to (1) contribute unobtrusive and unsupervised research methodologies, (2) support educators' classroom orchestration through visualizations, (3) support learner reflection with continuous and reliable evidence, (4) develop novel theories about social and collaborative learning, and (5) empower educational stakeholders with the quantitative data to evaluate different learning spaces. These findings could support learning analytics and educational technology scholars and practitioners to better understand and utilize SSLA to support future educational research and practice.Notes for Practice center dot Socio-spatial learning analytics (SSLA) can uncover meaningful educational insights from learners' and educators' social and spatial behaviour traces in co-located learning spaces, where the majority of the interaction and collaboration unfolds in the physical space instead of being fully mediated by computers.center dot This systematic literature review identifies the prominent theoretical and empirical works, sensing technologies, learning contexts, sensing technologies, socio-spatial behaviours, and educational constructs investigated in prior SSLA studies.center dot SSLA provides five opportunities for supporting educational research and practices: contributing innovative research methodologies, supporting classroom orchestration, supporting learner reflection, developing novel theories, and evaluating learning spaces.