The results presented in the following empirical studies of this dissertation have been published or submitted for publication in the following way:
Study I: Teacher and Student Perspectives on Incoherences and Within-S-tudent Characteristics Diversity
Huber, S. A., & Seidel, T. (submitted). Comparing Teacher and Student Perspec-tives on the Interplay of Cognitive and Motivational-Affective Student Character-istics. Journal for Learning and Individual Differences.
The manuscript was submitted for publication in October 2016 to this journal.
Study II: Students with Incoherent Dispositions: Development and Internal Learning Processes
Huber, S. A., H¨ausler, J., Jurik, V., & Seidel, T. (2015). Self-underestimating students in physics instruction: Development over a school year and its connection to internal learning processes. Journal for Learning and Individual Differences, 43, 83–91. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2015.08.021
The manuscript was submitted for publication in October 2014 to this journal.
After a revision, it was accepted for publication in August 2015.
Conception, preparation, analyses, and presentation for both manuscripts were performed in the context of this dissertation. This process was supported by the co-authors (see Appendix B.4).
Chapter 6
Study I: Comparing Teacher and Student Perspectives on
Incoherences and Characteristics Diversity
General principles of teaching and learning must be adapted to suit the way these principles operate with different students (Shuell, 1996).
The first part of this study’s rational originates in the fact, that educational research does not yet agree on how to best describe these individual differences in students. While ample research considers differences in students’ background like gender, race, or socio-economic background (e.g. Birenbaum & Nasser, 2006), this dissertation argues that differences in students’ cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics should be focused on. It claims that students’ backgrounds play an important role in the formation and development of these characteristics, but learning processes are more directly effected by the latter (Cohen et al., 2009; Seidel & Reiss, 2014). Additionally, it argues that even though background influences characteristics, there is still considerable variations within student groups of the same background (Hope et al., 2013), so that a focus on student characteristics directly, can provide a better picture of individual differences relevant for teaching and learning processes.
This dissertation draws upon considerations regarding cognitive and
motivational-59
60 Chapter 6. Study I: Within-Student Characteristics Diversity affective competences as outcomes of learning and cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics as prerequisites of learning merging them in the concept of student learning dispositions. While the importance of these dispositions in general as well as their single characteristics components have been studied in depth (Deary et al., 2007;
Marsh & Martin, 2011), individual differences between students are only starting to move to the focal point of the debate. In studies that do explore differences in the composition of students’ learning dispositions, incoherences in the interplay of different cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics are found for a majority of students (Seidel, 2006; Lau & Roeser, 2008; Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., 2012). However, they still look at different groups of students instead of individuals. The aim of this study is to explore the full extent of individual differences among student dispositions by finding a way to measure the differences in their configurations of different cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics, their within-student characteristics diversity.
In this, it targets the Individual Characteristics block of the framework model and focuses on the red double arrow illustrating the interplay of different characteristics (cf.
Figure 6.1).
The second part of this study’s rational is grounded in the debate of the imple-mentation of the idea of adapting general principles of teaching to different students.
On the one hand, the application of this idea is prominent in current educational policy (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2009; United States Federal Education Legislation, 2002). At the same time, it often fails in practice (e.g. Schiepe-Tiska et al., 2013). In trying to explain this discrepancy, educational research is currently exploring a prerequisite for this implementation in depth: teachers’
perceptions of their students’ dispositions. Studies have examined how accurately teachers judge single or multiple student characteristics (S¨udkamp et al., 2012; Spinath, 2005) and which biases play a role in teacher judgment processes (Fiedler et al., 2002).
Nevertheless, the knowledge on teachers’ perception of students’ individual differences with regards to their dispositions is still incomplete. This study aims at supplementing this knowledge with an additional perspective: Examining how teachers’ perceive the diversity in the interplay of cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics and finding out if they see the incoherences in student dispositions. Thereby, the study examines the Diagnostic Competence block in the framework model that connects
6.1. Research Questions and Conjectures 61 teacher competences to students’ individual characteristics (depicted by the blue eye in Figure 6.1).
A third aspect considered in this study concerns the fact that the general principles of teaching and learning also operate differently in different content areas (Shuell, 1996). Therefore, the above investigations are carried out seperately for two
subject domains, mathematics and language arts.
6.1 Research Questions and Conjectures
This study investigated the diversity in the within-interplay of four character-istics: general cognitive ability, prior achievement, interest, and self-concept. In a methodological triad, three aspects of this diversity are considered:
(a) Correlation-like pairwise connections between variables were explored from a student and teacher perspective to verify that variable-centered perspectives were in line with existing research. (b) The Shannon-Wiener Diversity indices adapted from diversity measurement in theoretical biology quantified the amount of diversity in the interaction of student characteristics from student and teacher perspective. Related t
STUDY I
SupplyUse
Individual Characteristics Teacher Competences
Diagnostic Competence
Cognitive
Motiva tional-affective
Figure 6.1: Framework for Study 1: Within-student characteristics diversity is regarded from a student perspective (red arrow) and a teacher perspective (blue eye)
62 Chapter 6. Study I: Within-Student Characteristics Diversity tests allowed for statistical tests between both perspectives and between subjects. (c) Configural frequency analyses further examined the distribution of types of students with regard to their sets of characteristics from a student and a teacher point of view.
The following three research questions were studied:
6.1.1 Within-Student Characteristics Diversity
Research Question I. How much within-student diversity is found in the interplay of the four student characteristics?
Conjectures: Following variable-centered research on the relationship of the different student characteristics, the study suspected to find low to moderate positive connections between the different characteristics in the variable-centered approach (a).
Considering those low connections on variable level, further person-centered analyses were conjectured to yield high within-student diversity (b) and few over-frequented types (meaning sets of characteristics that appeared more often than statistically expected) (c).
6.1.2 Teacher Perceptions of Within-Student Characteristics Diversity
Research Question II. How much within-student diversity do teachers perceive?
Conjectures: Regarding research on the possible biases in teacher judgment processes and in line with prior findings, the study expected teacher perceptions of the four characteristics to be tied moderately to closely (a). Diversity index comparisons were therefore expected to show significantly less diversity in teacher perceptions compared to student assessment (b) and possibly over-frequented homogeneous student types (meaning within-student characteristics are homogeneously judged as low/medium/high) (c).
6.1.3 Within-Student Characteristics Diversity – Student and Teacher Perspectives in Different Domains
Research Question III. Can within-student characteristics diversity be found differently in two subjects?
6.2. Method 63