Using Self-Assessment and Remediation to Raise Middle School Student Achievement in Math

Cognitive Structure Analysis (CSA) is an assessment framework designed to identify and address students’ knowledge deficits. Through self-assessment students can identify their own knowledge gaps, enabling them to remediate gaps in understanding. Previous studies have demonstrated the reliability of teaching students to use CSA to assess their own knowledge in various academic disciplines, including calculus (Cynkin and Leddo, 2023) and chemistry (Dandemraju, Dandemraju, and Leddo, 2024). These studies, however, primarily focused on the identification of knowledge gaps rather than their remediation. As accurate assessment does not inherently address deficiencies, later studies began to investigate CSA’s role in addressing the gap. Ravi and Leddo (2024) conducted a study in which students learned an advanced chemistry topic by watching a video. Half of the students rewatched to reinforce their understanding, while the other half were trained to use CSA to self-assess their knowledge and then rewatched the video specifically to remediate assessed knowledge gaps. The CSA-trained group outperformed the control group by 15 points (1.5 letter grades) on a post-test. This finding was replicated with other high school students in the subjects of Spanish (Nehra and Leddo, 2024), reading (Prakash and Leddo, 2025a), math (Prakash and Leddo, 2025b) and history (Prakash and Leddo, 2025c). The present study continues the investigation of CSA in academic concepts through analyzing its impact in algebra, particularly that of the exponential topics. 19 middle school students were divided into two groups. Both groups studied two videos about the exponentials, but only the experimental group used CSA to self-assess their knowledge and remediate gaps. Post-test results revealed the significant statistical difference between the control and experimental groups, the control scoring an average of 42% compared to the experimental group’s 70.4%