One important goal of instruction is to support students’ self-regulated choice making during learning. How might we support students’ strategic choice-making behaviors? In my dissertation, I co-designed with middle-school students a metacognitive intervention package that included an interactive tutorial, adaptive recommendations, and a learner-facing dashboard to support students’ self-regulated choice making when learning algebra with visual scaffolding (i.e., when to use the visual scaffold to aid problem solving).
A classroom experiment found that students whose choices were supported with the intervention package showed strategic choice-making behaviors (i.e., used the visual scaffold less frequently overall, and rather used when they “needed” the scaffold) and learned greater conceptual and procedural knowledge in algebra.
