Is that problem motivating for school students? A conceptual replication study about pre-service teachers’ diagnostic competence

Selecting mathematical problems requires teachers to anticipate students’ learning needs and motivational responses. Understanding how teachers judge students’ motivation across problem types is essential for effective instructional design. However, little is known about the accuracy of such judgments or their relationship to teachers’ own motivational perceptions. This study replicates the work of Böswald and Schukajlow ( 2023 ), who investigated how pre-service teachers judge students’ task value and self-efficacy across problems differing in their degree of contextualisation. Extending the original design—which contrasted pre-service teachers’ self-ratings with judgments of hypothetical students—we included a sample of sixth-grade students and revised the mathematical content to focus on area measurement. This three-perspective design enables a comparison of task-related motivation and provides insights into how motivational appraisals vary by problem type. We address four research questions concerning how pre-service teachers (via self-ratings and diagnostic judgments) and students rate task value and self-efficacy for problems differing in their degree of contextualisation, and whether these ratings differ across perspectives. A total of 154 pre-service teachers and 160 sixth-grade students rated their perceived task value and self-efficacy for 12 problems, and 222 pre-service teachers judged these attributes for hypothetical students solving the same problems. Analyses confirm that problem type influences both motivational constructs across perspectives and that pre-service teachers’ perceived motivation relates to their diagnostic judgments. The study contributes to research on diagnostic competence and underscores the importance of replication for confirming and extending findings in mathematics education.