Abstract
Technology-based assessment offers unique opportunities to collect data on students’ cognitive development and to use that data to provide both students and teachers with feedback to improve learning. The aim of this study was to show how the psychological dimension of learning can be assessed in everyday educational practice through technology-based assessment in reading, mathematics and science. We analyzed three related aspects of the assessments: cognitive development, gender differences and vertical scaling. The sample for the study was drawn from primary school students in Grades 1–8 (ages 7 to 14) in Hungary. There were 1500 to 2000 students in each grade cohort. Online tests were constructed from 1638 items from the reading, mathematics, and science domains in the eDia system. The results confirmed that the disciplinary, application and psychological dimensions of learning can be distinguished empirically. Students’ cognitive development was the most steady (and effective) in mathematics, where the greatest development occurred in the first years of schooling. Path models suggested that the psychological dimension of learning can be predicted at a moderate level based on students’ level of school knowledge consisting of the disciplinary and application dimensions of learning as latent constructs. The predictive power was almost the same in both dimensions. Generally, girls developed faster in the psychological dimension of reading, mathematics and science learning; however, the size of gender differences varied by age and domain. This study (1) provides evidence that the psychological dimension of learning can be made visible even in an educational context, (2) highlights the importance of the explicit development of the psychological dimension of learning during school lessons, and (3) shows that there are gender differences in the developmental level of the psychological dimension of learning in favor of girls but that this varies by grade and domain.
Highlights
Improving students’ cognitive abilities has always been a goal of schooling since the very beginning of formalized education (Hattie and Anderman, 2013)
We briefly introduce the 3-dimensional theoretical framework that forms the basis for the diagnostic assessment system, and we elaborate on the psychological dimension in more detail, as that is the focal topic of the present study
We propose the psychological dimension of knowledge does contain “domain-specific reasoning skills,” and general reasoning skills embedded in different content and contexts, which has lately been referred to as transversal skills; and is not the same as procedural knowledge
Summary
Improving students’ cognitive abilities has always been a goal of schooling since the very beginning of formalized education (Hattie and Anderman, 2013). In the 20th century, several research schools and paradigms sought to conceptualize cognition, define its key constructs and make them measurable (see e.g., Binet and Simon, 1916; Inhelder and Piaget, 1958; Adey, 2007). Research on intelligence and the related psychometric tradition, Piaget and his school, and the cognitive revolution have all had a major impact on redefining the goals of education. The related research, including a number of experiments, resulted in a better understanding of the role that cognitive processes play in school learning, but it has had a modest impact on educational practice
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