How to Best Support Teachers’ Adaptive Task-Selection Practices by Formative Assessment Reports? An Experiment

Adaptive teaching practices align to students’ assets and learning needs, for example, by selecting tasks adaptively so that the next learning goal for a student can be achieved. While digital formative assessment tools have been developed to provide insights into students’ assets and learning needs, little is known how formative assessment reports can best be designed to support teachers’ adaptive task-selection practices. This study investigates how teachers' task-selection practices relate to the learning goals they explicitly or implicitly address (RQ1) and how digital formative assessment (DFA) reports can support these practices (RQ2). A cluster-randomized experiment (focusing on the example topic of multiplication) was conducted with mathematics teachers (n = 267). The researchers assigned teachers to one of three support conditions: the Error-Analysis report (analyzing student errors), the Next-Goal report (providing the student's next learning goal), and the Goal-and-Asset report (highlighting students' assets on which the teacher could build). Results show that only 25% of teachers addressed the relevant learning goal of unit structures in their task justifications. However, the Next-Goal report (p = .047, odds ratio 2.12) and the Goal-and-Asset report (p = .032, odds ratio 2.23) significantly improved the likelihood of addressing this goal in the logistic regression models. In contrast, no support effects were found for task selection practices. We conclude that formative assessment reports can modestly contribute to supporting teachers’ adaptive lesson planning practices, but should be combined with professional development workshops to increase the effects.