Abstract

Teachers' ability to assess student cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics is a requirement to support individual students with adaptive teaching. However, teachers have difficulty in assessing the diversity among their students in terms of the intra-individual combinations of these characteristics in student profiles. Reasons for this challenge are assumed to lie in the behavioral and cognitive activities behind judgment processes. Particularly, the observation and utilization of diagnostic student cues, such as student engagement, might be an important factor. Hence, we investigated how student teachers with high and low judgment accuracy differ with regard to their eye movements as a behavioral and utilization of student cues as a cognitive activity. Forty-three participating student teachers observed a video vignette showing parts of a mathematics lesson to assess student characteristics of five target students, and reported which cues they used to form their judgment. Meanwhile, eye movements were tracked. Student teachers showed substantial diversity in their judgment accuracy. Those with a high judgment accuracy showed slight tendencies toward a more “experienced” pattern of eye movements with a higher number of fixations and shorter average fixation duration. Although all participants favored diagnostic student cues for their assessments, an epistemic network analysis indicated that student teachers with a high judgment accuracy utilized combinations of diagnostic student cues that clearly pointed to specific student profiles. Those with a low judgment accuracy had difficulty using distinct combinations of diagnostic cues. Findings highlight the power of behavioral and cognitive activities in judgment processes for explaining teacher performance of judgment accuracy.

Highlights

  • Teacher assessment skills are an essential component of professional competence (Baumert and Kunter, 2006, 2013; Binder et al, 2018)

  • Student teachers had an average judgment accuracy score of 2.23 (SD = 1.23) across all profiles. This distribution indicates that student teachers differ substantially in their judgment accuracy

  • Our study has shown that some of the student teachers are already quite able to successfully assess student characteristics, a large number of them still struggles with this important task, which will later become a regular part of their professional everyday life

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Summary

Introduction

Teacher assessment skills are an essential component of professional competence (Baumert and Kunter, 2006, 2013; Binder et al, 2018). Other students are aware of their abilities, and hold high cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics (Seidel, 2006). Students with such varying profiles differ in how they engage with, achieve in, and experience their learning environment (Seidel, 2006; Lau and Roeser, 2008; Jurik et al, 2013, 2014), and their positive educational development depends on tailored teacher instruction (Huber et al, 2015). We investigate how well teachers are able to accurately judge various student profiles We link this judgment accuracy to two factors: eye movements (as a measure of the behavioral activity of observing students) and utilization of student cues (as a measure of the cognitive activity) behind judgment processes

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