Fostering Students’ Measurement Estimation Skills in a Digital Teaching-Learning Environment: A Class-Wise Randomized Controlled Trial in Grade 5

Students’ measurement estimation skills require benchmark knowledge (about measures of known objects) and estimation strategies (ways to compare with benchmarks). While students’ estimation skills have been assessed and unpacked in several empirical studies (for length and area but less for mass), approaches for fostering them have hardly been empirically studied. We present the instructional design of a digital teaching-learning environment designed to foster fifth graders’ estimation skills for mass measures and empirical evidence for its efficacy. The teaching-learning environment encompassed two 45-minute sessions and drew upon the design principles of cognitive engagement with worked examples, enhanced communication, and scaffolding. A class-wise randomized controlled trial was conducted in 14 classes (involving n = 310 students) with three treatment groups, and two intervention groups worked on estimation strategies in the teaching-learning environment. Both intervention groups significantly outperformed the control group in the post test. The intervention group with highly structured scaffolds only tended to explain the strategies slightly better than the intervention group with regular scaffolds, albeit not significantly. The findings show that estimation skills can be effectively fostered, with a modest indication that highly structured scaffolds might hold promise for longer interventions to enhance students’ discourse practices.

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