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ABSTRACT
While some research has highlighted how teachers prepare their course materials, little is known about how future teachers design support for their students, and thus plan and anticipate what can and will happen in the classroom. We have therefore sought to investigate whether identifiable learner profiles emerge when regular primary school students are offered a complex task: How students respond to the task? How well they perform? The ambition was to develop a typology of profiles concerning student task engagement that would allow any teacher to anticipate regulatory actions that would be matched as closely as possible to the realities of the classroom. To do this, we observed 282 French-speaking Belgian students aged 10–12 years old in the first moments of performing a complex reading task. The data analysis revealed that six learner profiles can be used to plan teaching activities: the ‘regular’ student, the student who gets discouraged because the task seems too complex, the one who gets blocked during the task, the one who bypasses the actual task without achieving the learning objectives, the one who does not engage in the task and the high-performing student who finishes faster than the others.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The socio-economic index is determined according to five main categories: per capita income, graduation level, unemployment rate, professional activities and housing comfort. A formula is used, weighting each of these categories, to arrive at a synthetic index assigned to each student according to their sector of residence. The lower the index, the lower the socio-economic background of the institution. The index therefore makes it possible to rank schools on a scale of 20; schools ranging from 1 to 5 are differentiated and receive additional funding for the supervision of exceptional pupils (in the form of teacher periods or operating budgets).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stéphane Colognesi
Stéphane Colognesi is professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Louvain, Belgium. His research interest focuses on learning and instruction in both primary and secondary school as well as in higher education. More specifically, Colognesi’s research concentrates on Learning and Instruction (writing and oral), Teacher Education, and support for teachers.
Josée-Anne Gouin
Josée-Anne Gouin is professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Laval, Québec. Her research focuses on Practical Teacher Education, Pedagogical Intervention and Classroom Management.