What Forms of Student Sensemaking Predict Mathematics Learning?: Student Perspectives on Opportunity, Comfort, and Utility

Abstract

Instructional practices that require student sensemaking of mathematics are considered critical to learning outcomes, yet strategies for measurement of this instruction at scale have yet to be established. This study aims at validating and exploring the predictive validity of three student survey measures: students' opportunity to engage with, comfort engaging with, and utility of engaging with instructional practices targeting sensemaking in mathematics. Using an initial sample of 1,955 US middle school student responses, we conducted exploratory factor analysis to establish sensemaking construct structure, identifying two distinct factors reflecting students' active and passive participation in mathematical sensemaking. We then analyzed data from an additional 3,170 surveys collected over two years in the same context to confirm measurement properties and evaluate the measures' predictive validity. The resulting measures capture students' reported opportunities to engage in sensemaking practices (Sensemaking Opportunity), their comfort with engaging in those practices (Sensemaking Comfort), and their perceived utility of those practices when tackling new or difficult math problems (Sensemaking Utility). While Sensemaking Comfort and Sensemaking Utility both showed strong predictive validity over two years, Sensemaking Utility provided the most reliable estimates of student sensemaking. These findings offer researchers and practitioners a psychometrically sound, scalable toolkit for monitoring sensemaking in mathematics classrooms with implications for both large-scale research on instructional quality and teachers' ongoing efforts to monitor and improve their practice.