Reflective Assessment, Feedback and Academic Achievement in High School Mathematics

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of metacognitive strategies and content-specific feedback on student achievement in high school mathematics. Participants in the study consisted of a convenience sample of honors geometry students in grades 9 and 10 in a private high school located in Daytona Beach, Florida. Beyond answering the specific research questions raised in the study, an additional aim was to contribute to the growing body of knowledge pertaining to effective ways to use metacognitive instruction and provide effective content-specific feedback to improve student achievement and learning. A quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control-group design with repeated-measures was employed in the study. Descriptive and inferential statistics were computed to address the research questions. Specifically, an ANOVA with repeated measures, two-tailed test, was performed. For this purpose, a single within-subject factor, termed Assessment, was defined. Three levels were allocated to this factor, Pre-test, Post-test and Retention Test. Group was defined as a between-subjects factor and the two levels allocated to this factor were Comparison and Experimental. Tests of statistical significance were analyzed at the .05 level. There was a statistically significant main effect of the variable Group (F(1, 73) = 7.27, p = .009, hp2 = .091). Students in the experimental group outperformed the students in the comparison group. According to the effect size estimate, about 9% of variance in the Testing variable was attributable to the Group variable. Specifically, there was a statistically significant difference in the post-test (p = .02, Cohen’s d = .57). This effect size calculated using Cohen’s d formula is considered medium in magnitude (Cohen, 1988, 1992). There was statistically significant time effect (F(1, 73) = 1185, p = .000, hp2 = .942). The retention test scores were lower than the post-test scores, however, students in the experimental group significantly outperformed the students in the comparison group in the retention test scores (p = .00, Cohen’s d = .69). The findings of this study offer a modest contribution to the body of empirical research on the impact of metacognitive practice and content-specific feedback on academic achievement at the high school level. Further studies are warranted to add to the body of literature and more specifically to provide great clarity regarding the magnitude of the current investigation