At the International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2025), held at the beginning of last November, our joint research with the Fukuoka City Board of Education and Fukuoka Seiryo High School received the Best Paper Award!! Honestly, I am surprised… I would like to thank the reviewers and the committee members. I am deeply honored.

Geng, X., Ozaki, K., and Yamada, M.(2025). From Dashboard to Classroom: A Case Study of Teacher-Facing dashboard Impact on learning performance and Behaviors, Proceedings of CELDA 2025

I say “honestly surprised” because the sample size was only about 16, which is certainly very limited data, so it was an exploratory analysis intended to look ahead to future research. I didn’t expect it to win a Best Paper Award, so the first author, Dr. Geng, had a return flight to catch; he left the closing ceremony halfway through and departed before the awards were announced. Well, trains in Europe really do run late…

Therefore, Dr. Wang, a former assistant professor at the Research Institute for Information Technology at Kyushu University who is now at Durham University, accepted it on his behalf, and then passed the certificate to Dr. Taniguchi, who was also participating from the same center. I then handed it to Dr. Geng the other day when we were having coffee at Starbucks after a meeting (laughs). An award ceremony at Starbucks.

The content involves a cross-sectional analysis of logs from the digital teaching material distribution system “B-QUBE” and the teacher-facing handwritten note analysis system “Activity Monitor.” It analyzes how students’ learning behaviors transitioned after teachers opened the handwritten note analysis tool to check the situation. While the use of generative AI and system development research are strong trends in Learning Analytics research, intervention research is also very important; it is necessary to verify how learning behaviors change and lead to learning outcomes after teachers and students use these tools. This research is positioned as such an intervention study and is an exploratory one. I never expected a Best Paper Award at this stage, so I feel a mix of surprise and joy. We are currently proceeding with the deployment of B-QUBE and Metaboard through joint research with the Fukuoka City Board of Education and various municipal schools that have volunteered, and I would like to continue working hard on research that can make more progressive use of teachers’ empirical knowledge and improve students’ learning outcomes.

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Dr. Wang pointed out something I hadn’t realized: I actually received the Best Paper Award at the same international conference exactly 10 years ago. At the closing ceremony, Dr. Wang was sitting next to me, and I didn’t think I would win at all, so I was doing other work. I didn’t notice my name being called until Dr. Wang said, “You’re being called!!” It’s been 10 years… and then I realized that 5 years before that, Dr. Chen, who was a student of ours, also won at the same international conference (laughs).

I am truly grateful for this high evaluation. Thank you very much.