Using student personas when developing digital mathematics learning resources to improve teacher training

Figures & data

Figure 1. Prototypical mathematics student persona from a previous study (Weinhandl et al., 2022).

Figure 2. Updated TPACK Model according to Mishra (2019).

Table 1. Overview of project phases.

Phase	Goal	Task
1	Familiarization with student personas.	Read through the student personas. Pay particular attention to the characteristics and needs of each student persona.
2	Connecting learning materials to student personas.	Have a look at already existing digital learning resources (within the project); match the learning resources to student personas attending to their characteristics and needs.
3	Working with multiple student personas in mind.	Develop (or assign) digital learning resources specifically to two personas, while attending to their characteristics and needs. (The research team assigned two specific student personas to each study participant.)

Figure 3. Exemplary digital learning resources.

Table 2. Example codes from our study.

Keyword	Definition	Prototypical example
Ease of use	A compact representation of the personas is important for their practicability.	“The presentation should be compact, not too long and easy to grasp at a glance.”
Insight into characteristics of different mathematics students	Personas serve as an information tool for mathematical (needs and goals) and extra-mathematical (interests) information about students. The information can be used to create materials for different personas.	“For me it is important to know the needs of the students. The students’ goals are also important because as a teacher I have the responsibility to help the students achieve their goals.”
Trigger reflection processes (related to the user)	Working with personas triggers a reflection on the heterogeneity of the student body, the diversity of students (differences and similarities) and the relevance of differentiation. It also leads to a broadened perception of student facets by expanding one’s own knowledge and assumptions about students.	“With the personas, I think it comes out well that even average students have different goals and needs. I also often find myself not responding well to very motivated pupils because I limit myself to the minimum. However, it is important not to forget such students and to give them sufficient support.”

Table 3. Intercoder reliability in our study.

	Intercoder reliability according to
	Miles and Huberman’s formula	Cohen’s Kappa
Interview round 1	0.955	0.949
Interview round 2	0.99	0.99
Interview round 3	0.981	0.973
Average value	0.975	0.971

Weinhandl, R., Mayerhofer, M., Houghton, T., Lavicza, Z., Eichmair, M., & Hohenwarter, M. (2022). Personas characterising secondary school mathematics students: Development and applications to educational technology. Education Sciences, 12(7), 447. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12070447

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Mishra, P. (2019). Considering contextual knowledge: The TPACK diagram gets an upgrade. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 35(2), 76–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/21532974.2019.1588611

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