Improving Students’ and Teachers’ Judgments of Student Performance in Primary School Mathematics Problem Solving

Abstract

In primary school, teachers and students share responsibility for students’ learning progress. Teachers are expected to provide ‘adaptive’ or ‘differentiated’ instruction: making instructional decisions that are adapted to the diverse needs of individual students. Students are increasingly expected to (learn to) self-regulate their learning. Consequently, teachers are also increasingly expected to help students develop their self-regulated learning skills. The effectiveness of self-regulated learning and adaptive instruction hinges on the accuracy of two key processes: Monitoring and regulation. Monitoring refers to evaluations of individual students’ performance. Regulation refers to decisions about what subsequent activities (e.g., restudy, additional practice, or additional instruction) learners should engage in to improve their performance. Prior research showed that there is much room for improving the accuracy of students’ and teachers’ monitoring and regulation judgments. This dissertation presents studies on how this accuracy can be improved; zooming in on primary school students’ and teachers’ monitoring and regulation judgments of students’ performance on mathematical problem-solving tasks. The main findings support the idea that providing students and teachers with access to information that is highly predictive of students’ actual performance, improves their monitoring accuracy. That is, having students self-score their answers made their judgments of their own performance more accurate and providing teachers with access to students’ scores on similar prior tasks, made teachers’ judgments of their students’ performance more accurate. Yet, when it comes to developing students’ regulation skills, both students and teachers seem to need further support: Even after self-scoring, many students still need help from their teachers to make accurate regulation decisions, while teachers have difficulty identifying which students need their help in doing so. These findings set the stage for further research on how providing students and teachers with information that is highly predictive of students’ actual performance can improve the effectiveness of students’ self-regulated learning and teachers’ differentiation practices.