Teacher Judgments of Student Reading and Math Skills: Associations With Child- and Classroom-Related Factors

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to examine whether students’ linguistic skills and task-avoidant behavior (i.e., the child-related factors) and the mean level of academic skills (reading comprehension and math) of classmates (i.e., the class-related factor) are associated with teacher judgments of children’s reading comprehension and math skills. The participants were third-grade Estonian-speaking students (n = 656; age 9−11 years) and their classroom teachers (n = 51). The results of the structural equation modeling path analyses indicated that teachers tend to judge students showing higher academic and linguistic skills and lower avoidance behavior as higher on the reading comprehension and math skills. In contrast, the classmates’ higher academic skill level was related to lower judgments of individual children’s reading comprehension and math skills by teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher judgements
• classroom context
• reading comprehension
• math skills

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Estonian Research Council [grant number IUT03-03] and European Social Fund Program Eduko (via the Archimedes Foundation) [grant number 30.2-4/549]. We would like to thank Anu Palu for developing the math test Estonian Ministry of Education and Research [grant number. IUT3-3].