Adaptive Teaching Across 24 Classrooms: End-of-Year Engagement, Participation, and Implementation Experiences
Keywords:
adaptive teaching, student engagement, classroom participation, diagnostic responsiveness, teacher judgement, mixed methodsAbstract
Adaptive teaching requires teachers to interpret evidence of learning and participation, select an instructional response, and judge whether that response should be maintained, modified, or withdrawn. This study examines end-of-year engagement and participation indicators from 347 students in 24 classrooms across six secondary and post-secondary institutions. Twelve classrooms used instruction organised around diagnostic responsiveness, contextual modulation, and reflective recalibration (n = 178 students), and 12 served as comparison classrooms (n = 169). The study summaries contained complete Week-36 group values for on-task time, interaction frequency, task completion, cognitive engagement, and emotional engagement. At Week 36, on-task time averaged 187.6 minutes per week in adaptive classrooms and 142.3 minutes in comparison classrooms; interaction frequency averaged 14.2 and 8.4 per week; task completion was 84.7% and 71.2%; cognitive engagement averaged 3.92 and 3.41; and emotional engagement averaged 3.78 and 3.36. Classroom observations reported Cohen’s κ = .79 for double-coded lessons, while implementation fidelity averaged 82% (range 71–94%). Qualitative summaries from 24 instructor interviews and six student focus groups involving 38 students identified three themes: attunement as labour, the paradox of structure, and technology as mediator rather than solution. The results indicate a consistent end-of-year pattern favouring the adaptive classrooms, while causal, longitudinal, and attainment-effect claims are not made.
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