Teachers’ Judgments About Their Students: The Effect of Cognitive Simplification Strategies on the Rating Process

Abstract

The common practice of asking teachers to provide ratings of their students is based on questionable assumptions about the ability of teachers to accurately integrate information from their numerous encounters with students. Borrowing from research in social cognition, an information-processing model of the rating process was proposed and tested by asking 18 teachers to rate 16 hypothetical student profiles formed by systematically varying information along six different dimensions. The results suggested that teacher rating is a schema-based process in which the covariation among rating items is a function of teachers’ implicit theories concerning the organization of student behaviors. The findings revealed possible biases in teachers’ ratings and indicated the importance of a theoretical model of the rating process.