Building personalised homework from a learning analytics based formative assessment: Effect on fifth‐grade students' understanding of fractions

Abstract

This study analyses the potential of a learning analytics (LA) based formative assessment to construct personalised teaching sequences in Mathematics for 5th‐grade primary school students. A total of 127 students from Spanish public schools participated in the study. The quasi‐experimental study was conducted over the course of six sessions, in which both control and experimental groups participated in a teaching sequence based on mathematical problems. In each session, both groups used audience response systems to record their responses to mathematical tasks about fractions. After each session, students from the control group were given generic homework on fractions—the same activities for all the participants—while students from the experimental group were given a personalised set of activities. The provision of personalised homework was based on the students' errors detected from the use of the LA‐based formative assessment. After the intervention, the results indicate a higher student level of understanding of the concept of fractions in the experimental group compared to the control group. Related to motivational dimensions, results indicated that instruction using audience response systems has a positive effect compared to regular mathematics classes. What is already known about this topic Developing an understanding of fractions is one of the most challenging concepts in elementary mathematics and a solid predictor of future achievements in mathematics. Learning analytics (LA) has the potential to provide quality, functional data for assessing and supporting learners' difficulties. Audience response systems (ARS) are one of the most practical ways to collect data for LA in classroom environments. There is a scarcity of field research implementations on LA mediated by ARS in real contexts of elementary school classrooms. What this paper adds Empirical evidence about how LA‐based formative assessments can enable personalised homework to support student understanding of fractions. Personalised homework based on an LA‐based formative assessment improves the students' comprehension of fractions. Using ARS for the teaching of fractions has a positive effect in terms of student motivation. Implications for practice and/or policy Teachers should be given LA/ARS tools that allow them to quickly provide students with personalised mathematical instruction. Researchers should continue exploring these potentially beneficial educational implementations in other areas.

Is Reality in Conflict with Perception? The Impact of Technology-Enhanced Active Learning and Formative Assessment on the Formation of Pre-Service Teachers in the Social Sciences

“…These results are similar to those obtained in other studies carried out in different academic fields concerning the use of active methodologies in general [57,60], the use of IBL and technology tools within the teaching-learning process in social science disciplines [10,26], and the integration of LA to achieve formative student assessment [6,19,38]. Hence, these findings suggest that this educational approach is beneficial to learning at the tertiary level.…”

“…According to Kori et al [37], the presence of technology within the teaching-learning process boosts inquiry learning as it can be harnessed by pre-service teachers to facilitate their solution-finding processes, awareness, and simultaneously afford lecturers-and educators in general-the capability to closely monitor and assess how the learning process is progressing [18,25]. Something that is aligned with the importance of integrating LA to foster both the students' daily and personalised feedback and their formative assessment [5,19,38].…”

Learning analytics and assessment: Emerging research trends, promises and future opportunities

“…The authors indicated that learning analytics techniques for unstructured and multimodal student data hold the potential to further assess and elicit students' conceptions. Rodríguez-Martínez et al (2022) developed personalised mathematics homework based on students' responses in online formative assessments and documented that personalised homework generated in this way can boost student comprehension of fractions. These two studies shed light on novel learning analytics approaches that may advance future formative assessment of students' conceptions in different domains.…”

Impacto de la Evaluación Formativa en la Educación Primaria

“…Se consideraron además estudios sobre el uso de herramientas en el proceso de evaluación formativa (Aguilar & Fernández, 2018;Arévalo et al, 2020;Falcón et al, 2021;Kruit et al, 2020;Ordaz & Acle, 2021;Valverde, 2019) y el uso de herramientas digitales (Bonanzinga et al, 2022;Csapó & Molnár, 2019;Chen et al, 2020;Faber & Visscher, 2018;González-Lerma & Lugo-Silva, 2020;Moreno & Molins, 2021;Rodríguez-Martínez et al, 2022). Se consideran herramientas de diagnóstico como la evaluación de desempeño, utilizada en la evaluación formativa en educación primaria para monitorear el progreso de los estudiantes (Kruit et al, 2020).…”

“…Entre las herramientas digitales utilizadas, se tienen la evaluación formativa automática con retroalimentación interactiva (Bonanzinga et al, 2022); eDia (educativo, digital, interactivo y abierto), diseñada para proporcionar retroalimentación de diagnóstico para profesores y alumnos (Csapó & Molnár, 2019); la pizarra digital interactiva, la cual propicia el interés y la motivación de los alumnos (Chen et al, 2020); Snappet, la cual proporciona retroalimentación a los alumnos y profesores sobre el progreso de las tareas (Faber & Visscher, 2018). Otras herramientas digitales incluyen CLOUDLABS (González-Lerma & Lugo-Silva, 2020), Learning Analytics (Rodríguez-Martínez et al, 2022), AMC Anywhere (Gezer et al, 2021), entre otras. Adicionalmente se encuentra la rúbrica, utilizada como instrumento de evaluación de desempeño tanto para el alumno (Aguilar & Fernández, 2018;Ordaz & Acle, 2021) como para el docente (Arévalo et al, 2020) y futuro docente (Sánchez, 2021), o la evaluación entre pares, en la cual se involucra a los alumnos llevando a cabo la actividad y a su vez realizando la función como evaluador (Gómez et al, 2018;Martín del Pozo & Herrero, 2018;Valverde, 2019).…”