Promoting learners' self-regulated textbook use for overcoming impasses in solving mathematics exercises

ABSTRACT

To encourage students’ self-regulated learning at home, developing skills for textbook use to overcome learning-related impasses is crucial. This study examined the effects of providing mathematics class sessions that combined teacher instruction on appropriate textbook use with peer instruction, aimed at promoting students’ spontaneity and effectiveness in textbook use. Eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to an experimental group (n = 19), or a control group (n = 18) without the same emphasis on textbook use. The results showed students in the experimental group increased in their spontaneous textbook use when solving exercises. The analyses of students’ notes and responses in a delayed interview revealed that the experimental group students took more notes focused on the meanings and principles that contributed to a deeper understanding and changed their perceptions of the textbook. Based on these findings, the factors that promote students’ willingness and ability to use their textbooks are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Textbooks
• learning strategies
• self-regulated learning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Shin’ichi Ichikawa and Yuri Uesaka for their helpful comments and advice on this research, and Ayumi Nishikawa for assisting with coding of the participants’ notes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Power analyses with the program G*Power (Erdfelder et al., 1996) indicated, for Fisher's exact test (P₁= 0.10, P₂ = 0.40; Kim, 2016), 36 students would be needed to obtain statistical power at 0.8 with α = 0.05.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant-in-aid [19H00616] from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.