[Cognitive-motivational student profiles and their relevance for students' perception of teachers' learning support]

Providing adaptive learning support during instruction is a pivotal task for teachers. Nevertheless, the students' perceptions play a major role in how students can benefit from this support. Research has shown that these perceptions of instruction vary widely across learners and that such differences in students' perception can be explained by their cognitive and motivational characteristics. To date, however, there is only limited systematic research on differences in students' perception of teachers' learning support and on how these differences relate to different configurations of students' characteristics. This study aims to shed light on these aspects by using a person-centered approach, and intends to contribute to an improved understanding of student needs regarding learning support. By conducting latent profile analyses on student data from 633 fourth-grade mathematics students, we identified four distinct student profiles: (1) strong profile with high self-efficacy, high intrinsic motivation, and a high level of prior knowledge in mathematics; (2) motivated profile with high intrinsic motivation, medium self-efficacy, and a low level of prior knowledge; (3) unmotivated profile with low self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation, but a medium level of prior knowledge; and (4) struggling profile with low values on all variables. Students with strong and interested profiles perceived their teachers' learning support more positively than students with struggling and unmotivated profiles. These results point to major differences between individual perceptions of learning support, and highlight the need for further research.