Assessing the sense of ‘good at’ and ‘not good at’ toward learning topics of mathematics with conjoint analysis

Over the past years, educational psychology and pedagogy communities have focused on the metacognition formalism as a helpful approach to carry out investigations on the feeling of difficulty in mastering some classroom materials that students acquire through their subjective experiences of learning in schools. Motivated by hitherto studies, this work deals with the assessment of the awareness of ‘good at’ and ‘not good at’ that Japanese junior high school students have towards the main learning modules in their three years of mathematics. More specifically, the aims here are (i) to shed some light into how the awareness varies across the grades and gender; (ii) to get some insights into the extent to what the conjoint analysis can be applied to understand the students’ feelings toward learning activities. To accomplish them, a conjoint analysis survey with three conjoint attributes, each with two levels, were designed to assess the learners’ perceptions of ‘good at’ and ‘not good at’ with respect to arit...