Primary school teachers’ judgments of their students’ monitoring and regulation skills

Abstract

To help students improve their self-monitoring and self-regulation skills, teachers should have an accurate idea of how well students can monitor and regulate their learning. We investigated how accurately primary school teachers can judge their students’ monitoring and regulation accuracy and whether and how student characteristics are related to (the accuracy of) teacher judgments of student monitoring and regulation. Thirty-three teachers, teaching 9––10-year-old students, participated with their classes (N = 495 students). Students completed a multiplication and division task and made monitoring and regulation judgments before and after self-scoring their work. We measured (the accuracy of) teachers’ judgments of their students’ monitoring skills before self-scoring, and of their students’ regulation skills before and after self-scoring. Additionally, we measured teachers’ perceptions of student characteristics (e.g., conscientiousness, general mathematics ability, amount of teacher- student contact). Results showed that the teachers correctly estimated that, in general, their students made quite accurate monitoring and regulation judgments. However, they had difficulties with identifying those students who made substantially inaccurate monitoring and regulation judgments (for whom it is particularly important that the teachers can intervene). When taken together, teachers’ perceptions of student characteristics explained substantial variance in (the accuracy of) teacher judgments of students’ monitoring and regulation skills. Moreover, teacher judgments of students’ monitoring accuracy were more accurate when students were perceived to have learning problems or to be relatively more skilled in mathematics. These findings and measures can ultimately contribute to the design of interventions to help teachers judge and develop their students’ self-regulated learning skills.