Neue Veröffentlichung: Bez, S., Wurster, S., Tomasik, M. J., & Merk, S. (2026). Fostering teachers’ interpretations of formative assessment results using clustered heatmaps. Learning and Individual Differences, 132, 102992.

Neue Publikation aus dem Institut erschienen: Samuel Merk und Sarah Bez untersuchen darin gemeinsam mit Forschenden der Uni Mainz und Uni Zürich, wie Ergebnisse formativer Assessments so dargestellt werden können, dass Lehrkräfte sie möglichst einfach rezipieren und interpretieren können, um daran ihren Unterricht ausrichten zu können. Die beiden experimentellen Studien zeigen, dass clustered heatmaps Lehrkräfte dabei unterstützen können, Muster in den Ergebnissen wie Stärken und Schwächen von Schüler:innen akkurat und effizient zu erkennen.

Bez, S., Wurster, S., Tomasik, M. J., & Merk, S. (2026). Fostering teachers’ interpretations of formative assessment results using clustered heatmaps. Learning and Individual Differences, 132, 102992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2026.102992

A B S T R A C T
Teachers can use formative assessment results to inform their instruction to each student’s current level of understanding.
In practice, this is a complex task. Thus, we investigated in two preregistered online experiments
whether clustered heatmaps can support teachers in reading and interpreting assessment results accurately and
efficiently for adaptive teaching according to their students’ strengths and weaknesses. N =202 pre-service and
N =262 in-service teachers for primary and secondary education interpreted formative assessment results from
the subjects German and mathematics. The findings indicate that clustered heatmaps are sufficiently intuitive
and can improve the accuracy and efficiency with which teachers group students according to their strengths and
weaknesses. Novice teachers, in particular, appear to benefit from the algorithm-based visual cues provided by
clustered heatmaps. If future research corroborates this evidence, clustered heatmaps could be implemented in
dashboards to promote beneficial teacher-technology interactions with the aim of enhancing student learning.