Do converging student/teacher personality traits affect outcomes of teacher assessments?
Teacher judgement underpins key outcomes for individual students, class organisation and school management on a daily basis. Accurate and impartial judgements are central to a teacher’s professional competence. Are teachers as human beings totally resistant to value judgement and bias? This article in Journal of Educational Psychology scrutinises teacher assessments in the context of attraction and similarity in the teacher/student relationship.
Past research has shown unexplained variance in teacher judgements vs. standardised assessments on students. It is known that characteristics such as gender, race, socioeconomic status and even physical attractiveness can affect teacher/student interactions. Teachers inevitably use personal values as a benchmark in their judgements and might even be self-validating in their decisions. Student achievements have been judged more positively for those teachers feel greater attachment to than those they reject or feel indifference towards. This study focuses on similarity of personality traits between student and teacher and impact on judgement bias in overall and task specific contexts.
The authors hypothesise that teachers’ judgements are more prone to bias in an overall unstructured context than in task specific formal assessments, especially when personalities converge between student and teacher. To test this theory, data was taken from 293 grade 8 students and 94 teachers in Germany. Personality traits were assessed by a 15 point survey to establish a similarity index. Students undertook tests in reading comprehension and mathematical competence. Teachers gave a blind overall judgement on individual student ability vs. average grade 8 student. Teachers were then given test details and to predicted student performance based on specific questions. Fascinatingly, the hypotheses were upheld; in both subjects, greater personality similarity was seen in conjunction with a more positive overall teacher judgement about student ability. Conversely, in task-specific assessment, similarities had little impact on judgement outcomes.
This study proves a connection of likeability/affiliation and more positive teacher estimation. The authors note “Students who were more similar to their teacher were judged more positively than students who were more dissimilar.Thus, personality similarity, which was found to be uncorrelated with student achievement… systematically affects ….judgement.” Perhaps teacher assessments aren’t so rock solid after all?
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Read the full article online:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01443410.2014.998629
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