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Impact of Korean students’ individual learning time on math performance: differential effect of teachers’ assessment competency

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Abstract

As the 2015 revised national curriculum is being implementing in Korea, a teacher’s assessment competency has become a point of focus for the potential enhancement of students’ self-directed learning. Relevantly, a teacher’s competency in student assessment is correlated to his/her individual feedback practices. Although students’ self-directed learning affects academic performance and may vary based on their teachers’ assessment competency, few studies have investigated the effect of a teacher’s assessment competency, specially feedback practices, on student outcomes. Therefore, this study aims to empirically investigate the differential effect of a teacher’s assessment competency, particularly focusing on feedback practices (i.e., formative assessment feedback, homework feedback), on Korean students’ individual learning times and math achievements. For the analysis, a 3-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is employed using data of middle school students (N = 2942) and math teachers (N = 426) in 207 middle schools of the Gyeonggi Education Panel Study (GEPS). The study revealed that a teacher’s formative assessment feedback has a positive differential effect on math performance when controlling for student-, teacher-, and school-level covariates. In addition, the effect of individual learning time on math achievement was significantly dependent on teachers’ homework feedback. The study provides newfound empirical evidence that teacher feedback plays a pivotal role in promoting a student’s self-directed learning and academic achievement. Based on these findings, the implications of improving a teacher’s assessment competency are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We excluded the cases of students taught by more than two math teachers (see MS_MTCH26 variable). This will not weaken the results of the study since these cases are only 17 students in the total sample.

  2. For reference, we found that there were several mis-typed cases regarding SCH_ID in the student data. For example, students with the NSTID of “10,850,403”, “11,070,313”, and “10,310,101” had SCH_IDs of “1073,” “1074,” and “1086”, respectively. However, SCH_IDs must start with “2” in the SELS, but there is no school with these IDs in both teacher and school data. The SCH_IDs mentioned above are recognized as mis-typed information. Hence, we scoped out the cases and found that the first four digits of “MS_MTCH6” exactly indicated the information of schools. We created new school IDs using “MS_MTCH6.”

  3. Given the missing mechanism may differ from subjects, only math teachers were selected using the subject (MT070006) variable. No imputation was applied to the school-level covariates because of the low missing rate. Only for the case of school type (private school), we replaced missing cases with using prior data (the 5th wave) since missing values at school-level could lead to the loss of corresponding cases of students and teachers.

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  1. Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Sangmin Byeon

  2. Korean Educational Development Institute, Jincheon, Republic of Korea

    Nayoung Kim

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  1. Sangmin Byeon
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Byeon, S., Kim, N. Impact of Korean students’ individual learning time on math performance: differential effect of teachers’ assessment competency. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 21, 601–613 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-020-09643-z

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