Leveraging Exit Tickets to Enhance Students' Self-Regulated Learning and Mathematics Knowledge

An exit ticket is a recommended and widely used way to end a lesson. A typical exit ticket format in mathematics lessons is for students to solve a few problems related to the day’s lesson and turn it in when they exit the classroom. The most common purpose of exit tickets is to provide formative feedback to teachers about whether students have met the objectives of a given lesson. However, the psychology of learning literature suggests that there is an untapped potential for exit tickets to also benefit students’ learning directly. This project explores two potential enhancements to exit tickets, with the goal of improving high-school students’ mathematics knowledge and ability to regulate their own learning processes. These enhancements can be implemented easily by teachers in the context of exit tickets to support students’ self-reflection. This project will explore the impact of enhancements for supporting students in 1) determining how well they know material and 2) evaluating their strategy use and answers. These enhancements could benefit students’ mathematics performance on content tests and improve the quality of high-school mathematics instruction. The findings could generalize to a wide range of grades and domains and to other formative assessment types. Dissemination efforts will include sharing the results with practitioners, district administrators, and digital learning creators to increase the use of enhanced exit tickets if they are successful.

The project team will work with Integrated Mathematics I teachers to add enhancements to exit tickets for one curriculum unit and investigate whether and how the enhancements improve student outcomes. At least 680 students in a metropolitan school district that serves racially and economically diverse students will participate. The project uses a pretest-intervention-posttest design, with students randomly assigned to one of two conditions within their classroom: 1) enhanced exit tickets or 2) typical exit tickets. At pretest and posttest, students will complete measures of targeted self-regulated learning components (confidence calibration, metacognitive evaluation, mathematics self-efficacy, and mastery-approach goal orientation) as well as an assessment of mathematics performance. Using hierarchical linear models, analyses will investigate whether the enhanced exit tickets show more positive effects on student outcomes than typical exit tickets. Teacher interviews will explore whether the exit tickets were feasible for teachers to regularly implement and informed their instructional practices. Student interviews will explore students’ perceptions of the exit ticket enhancements. The research will expand existing theories of self-regulated learning by evaluating whether specific supports for self-reflection can each benefit multiple self-regulated learning outcomes as well as mathematics performance. The proposed studies will also reveal ways that this formative assessment device can be adapted to enhance students’ self-regulated learning and content knowledge. These enhancements could lead to exit tickets serving as a formative assessment of students’ self-regulated learning practices.