What teachers do: adaptive teaching using Adaptive Learning Technologies (ALTs) in primary education

Teachers are expected to provide adaptive teaching to support and provide challenges for all students. Increasingly teachers are using Adaptive Learning Technologies (ALTs) to support their adaptive teaching. The goal of this study is to examine how teachers combine adaptive teaching and ALTs during their lessons. Using lesson observations, semi-structured interviews and question-naires of 12 teachers, 108 adaptive actions, in which teacher were adjusting their teaching to one or multiple students with or without the ALT, were coded. The results showed that ALTs were used in 62% of the adaptive actions, whereas as in 38% of the actions the ALT was not used. The most important trigger of adaptive actions were differences in cognitive abilities of students. Latent Class Analysis revealed three types of adaptive actions used by teachers: 1. Flexible adjustments to the instruction decided on data from the ALT; 2. Mostly flexible adjustments to the instruction without consulting data in the ALT; 3. Mostly pre-set plans to adjust non adaptive problems for particular students in the ALT. The results contribute to increasing insights in adaptive teaching using ALTs and pro-vide a first basis to develop evidenced informed support for teachers to reflect on their adaptive teaching practices and use of ALTs therein.