Teacher-facing dashboards have become essential tools in modern education, playing a crucial role in tracking students’ performance, engagement, and learning experiences. Findings indicate that dash-boards improve teachers’ decision-making, self-regulation, and emotional engagement. Their effectiveness is often limited by several challenges, including Complex Data Processing (handling large volumes of intricate data can be overwhelming), High Cognitive Load (teachers may struggle with the excessive mental effort required to interpret complex dashboards), Data Privacy Issues (ensuring student data security and compliance with privacy regulations remains a concern), and Lack of Teacher Involvement in Dashboard Design (one of the most critical issues is that teachers are often not adequately involved in the design and development process of dashboards, making them less intuitive and practical for educators).

The literature review presented here has been conducted using a search on the Scopus database, selecting the most recent articles and conference proceedings published between 2020 and 2024. The paper focuses on analyzing research practices and exemplary prototypes for teaching. The main goal is to explore the impact of teacher dashboards on their performance, analytical abilities, and decision-making in recent research and identify the key features of dashboards, such as user-centered design, real-time data and alerts, and intuitive visualization integration, providing examples of dashboards realized and used in educational contexts. The above features influence the usability and functionality of dashboards and the way in which meaningful insights can be shared with teachers in an efficient and accessible manner.

Some dashboards that integrate with existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and are appreciated by teachers have shown highly positive results. AI predictive analytics dashboards, which are an emerging promising trend, generate predictive insights for student monitoring and adaptive learning. Despite these capabilities, several challenges to the widespread adoption of dashboards remain, such as data complexity, privacy concerns, teachers’ engagement, and scalability issues.

This study identifies recent research trends, collects good practices for co-design and development of teacher dashboards, and provides insights for teachers, policymakers, and dashboard designers. In addition, as far as the authors are concerned, the insights obtained from this study will be used to define research topics and methods on dashboards and design one for teachers within the online teaching activities carried out at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy).

Keywords: Teacher-facing dashboards, Learning analytics, Dashboard effectiveness, Teacher decision-making.