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Implementing confidence assessment in low-stakes, formative mathematics assessments
Confidence assessment (CA) involves students stating alongside each of their answers a confidence rating (e.g., 0 low to 10 high) to express how certain they are that their answer is correct. Each student’s score is calculated as the sum of the confidence ratings on the items that they answered correctly, minus the sum of the confidence ratings on the items that they answered incorrectly; this scoring system is designed to incentivise students to give truthful confidence ratings. Previous research found that secondary-school mathematics students readily understood the negative-marking feature of a CA instrument used during one lesson, and that they were generally positive about the CA approach. This paper reports on a quasiexperimental trial of CA in four secondary-school mathematics lessons (N = 475 students) across time periods ranging from 3 weeks up to one academic year, compared to business-asusual controls. A meta-analysis of the effect sizes across the four schools gave an aggregated Cohen’s d of –0.02 [95% CI –0.22, 0.19] and an overall Bayes Factor B01 of 8.48. This indicated substantial evidence for the null hypothesis that there was no difference between the attainment gains of the intervention group and the control group, relative to the alternative hypothesis that the gains were different. I conclude that incorporating confidence assessment into low-stakes classroom mathematics formative assessments does not appear to be detrimental to students’ attainment, and I suggest reasons why a clear positive outcome was not obtained.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
International Journal of Science and Mathematics EducationVolume
20Issue
7Pages
1411 - 1429Publisher
SpringerVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
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© The AuthorPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Springer under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-07-20Publication date
2021-09-03Copyright date
2021ISSN
1571-0068eISSN
1573-1774Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Colin Foster. Deposit date: 21 July 2021Usage metrics
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