Evidence teachers may be biased in their teacher assessments?

[DiamondAge]

It seems there is evidence that teachers may be biased in their teacher assessments, and that children are "stereotyped by 7".

Here's a link to the full paper, along with a link to a summary.

The suggestion here is that teacher assessments might be less accurate than, for example, externally examined tests or child completed tests and that teacher bias may be at least partly responsible for the disparities found in achievement between girls v boys and also for pupils needing FSM or having SEN compared to other pupils.

I've just settled down to read the full paper but would like to know what parents and teachers think - does this research match your experiences / make sense to you and if so what would you do about it?

I'd be very surprised if schools set on a social class basis. It's certainly not my experience but I've never had experience of schools near the IoE.

A very vague connection to school but no connection to National Curriculum levels

Brilliant. I am not remotely naive. It might suit you to think that I am but I do not rely solely on the data the Head gives to Governors, and that is very, very detailed! 36 pages at the last meeting.

Where Governors are doing a proper job, (presumably not at your school), we work very closely with individual teachers to monitor progress. Our assessments are done 6 times a year and, yes, I have confidence in their accuracy. We scrutinise this data for trends and have a development plan to address weaknesses. We also have our improvement partner monitoring too. I am therefore confident in the assessment data given to us and that the teachers assess as accurately as possible.

It might surprise you to know that I do talk to teachers and that we did have an issue with grade inflation at our feeder infant school. Both schools now work together (change of leadership at feeder school) so that there are no surprises when the children come into our school. A Governor's job is to challenge and that is what we do. KS2 children failing to meet expectations in the SATs tests is absolutely not what we want.

I don't know if it's different here in Wales but DH is a teacher and after they have graded the pupils they then have to take a huge amount of examples for each student to a local meeting where different schools come together and check each other to make sure grading is fair over the board. After that 10% of those schools also have national level moderators come in to check that they also agree on the grade boundaries. Not leaving much room for bias really. I'm interested to see how that checks out across the UK.

No it's not just in Wales.

I've just skimmed the summary, and have tagged the article to read later as it's an interesting one.

I would question the fact that the comparison was with standardised tests carried out in the home environment with students. A student taking an examination under exam conditions is likely going to have a different result to a child in their own home with very different pressures (and possibly being told it is 'just for fun' or 'not important' or other terminology which makes the child feel more relaxed).

Also the baseline from one test will not necessarily show the child's overall skills. Some students may be great at statistics, but poor at algebra. Give them a test and they may score 100% in one component and 0% in the other and they'll still get an overall score of 50%. It does not reflect their actual understanding. When I am looking at students, I am looking at more than one component of their knowledge - they may be able to rattle off complex mathematical equations, but if they cannot apply it to real world situations, then that is something I am going to pick up on and no standardised test is going to be able to give you that knowledge.

I am against performance pay for teachers. We keep wanting students to be treated as individuals with individual learning needs, but then keep trying to put them in to little boxes. I know my students. I know that X never gets to read at home, and I know that Y is going to have behavioural difficulties on Fridays if his mother didn't show up to access on Thursday night, and I know that Z comes to school without having breakfast and rarely gets given lunch. I can determine how all of those things impact upon them and how that affects my approach to teaching each child. Don't force me to only teach to the test and have to provide an arbitrary score in order to get a fair pay that year. It doesn't take in to account that I have given up my lunch breaks to make sure X gets to read, it doesn't show that I adjust my lesson planning to have activities on Friday mornings that means Y doesn't miss out on learning opportunities and you don't see that I make an extra sandwich every morning to give Z at lunch. If all you are seeing is a grade, then you forget to look at the child.

But the performance of teachers is NOT just looking at the grade!!!! It is a whole range of targets which help to improve learning in the school. If teachers are paid on grades alone, then the Head has not understood the policy and you, as a teacher, should not agree to just grades of children being considered. You need to look at progress, the quality of your lessons, how well you have achieved your additional duties, how well SEN and PP children in your class are progressing and anything else you might need to improve in your classroom or management skills.

If a Head is set a target to improve classroom teaching to X% good or above at their performance management meeting, then naturally the teachers who are needing to improve will be given all the support they need to succeed. Why is this wrong? The process naturally takes into account the learning needs of individual children and clearly all efforts to support children is part of the discussion. I think some teachers are not aware of how performance management works. Perhaps training is needed so you understand how it should work and then you could go into your performance review better prepared.

I think "performance pay" is a slippery thing.

In practice, it is almost always and everywhere competitive and employees are judged relative to one another. This might be fine when giving bonuses to a sales team or city traders, but in most situations the playing field isn't level, and it doesn't feel fair.

It causes a lot of pathologies in large corporates (try putting 5 people on a bell curve ). It doesn't encourage esprit de corp or team work. I believe it causes more problems than it solves.

Of course teachers like other professionals need to be held accountable and the boss should be aware of how they are doing, but "sharpening up" their environment seems like a bad idea to me. They have our precious children all day long. I don't want to make them more tense, pressured and miserable than they have to be!