Teacher assessments of student reading proficiency: Examining aspects influencing teachers’ assessments in PIRLS 2001

• Abstract There has been a large body of research showing that there are a number of factors that influence how well a student performs in school. One the one hand are student characteristics such as gender and socio-economic status (SES) well known predictors of the students’ study outcome. On the other hand, teachers’ characteristics, such as level of education, years of experience and certification are crucial to how well students’ perform in school. Thus, a number of factors influence student performance, but how do these mediators influence teachers’ assessments? The main aim of this paper is to examine teacher ratings of student reading literacy skills in relation to student achievement scores in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001. Another purpose is to investigate to what degree the ratings agree with the students’ performance development and particularly how teachers rate students with different gender and SES, one aim is also to study teachers characteristics, that is, education and experience affect rating practices. As a national extension of the PIRLS 2001 study, Swedish teachers rated students’ literacy skills on 18 different statements about on a scale ranging 1-10. This enables an investigation of the relationship between teacher ratings and student achievement in reading literacy. The present analysis was conducted in three steps. First, a model was fitted to the data where the variance of the teacher ratings was decomposed in a two-level latent model. Second, students’ achievement on the PIRLS test was used to examine the relation to teachers’ ratings, both within and between classes. Third, mediating variables of student and teacher characteristics were introduced to investigate differences in teachers rating practices. Preliminary results show that the differences in teacher ratings were large both within class and between classes, but that a substantial part of the variance was accounted for by student achievement. However, gender and SES could account for some of the differences in the teachers rating practice, as well could the teacher education, while no significant effects were estimated for teaching experience.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

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