Judgment Confidence and Judgment Accuracy of Teachers in Judging Self-Concepts of Students

ABSTRACT

Accurate teacher judgments of student characteristics are considered to be important prerequisites for adaptive instruction. A theoretically important condition for putting these judgments into operation is judgment confidence. Using a German sample of 96 teachers and 1,388 students, the authors examined how confident teachers are in their judgments of students’ mathematic and verbal self-concepts, and whether judgment confidence is related to judgment accuracy. Judgment confidence was largely student specific, and the majority of teachers were overconfident of their judgments. Moreover, teacher confidence was higher for extreme judgments. In the subject of mathematics, judgment confidence was moderately associated with judgment accuracy. The findings challenge the efficacy of adapting instruction to student characteristics, as it is obvious that many teachers are not aware of their judgment inaccuracy.

Keywords:

• diagnostic competence
• judgment accuracy
• judgment confidence
• self-concept
• teacher

Notes

1. To explain this unexpected result, Marsh (1986) developed the internal/external frame of reference model (I/E model). According to this model, the formation of self-concepts is dependent on two information sources: social comparisons (e.g., comparisons of an individual's own mathematic performance with those of his or her classmates) and dimensional comparisons (e.g., comparison of an individual's own mathematic performance with his or her own verbal performance). The influence of both comparisons on the self-concept is in the opposite direction of one another (positive for social and negative for dimensional comparisons). Thus, their influences offset one another that results in nonsignificant correlations between the mathematic and the verbal self-concept.

2. The subject of German (native language for most of the students) covers mainly literature and grammar.

3. In the German public school system, following Grade 4, students are allocated to one of the following three school types on the basis of academic achievement: The curriculum in a Hauptschule lasts for a period of 5 years, the curriculum in a Realschule lasts 6 years and in a Gymnasium—depending on federal state—students study for 8 or 9 years. The first two school types train students for future occupations (apprenticeship), and the third serves as preparation for university studies.

4. In judgment accuracy research, teacher judgments concerning students’ characteristics are usually surveyed with single-item scales (for an overview, see Südkamp, Kaiser, & Möller, 2012). To ensure comparability to this research and for economic reasons we decided to gather only one judgment per student, too. Thus, reliability cannot be estimated. Nevertheless, as judgment accuracy and instructional effectiveness are interrelated (Helmke & Schrader, 1987; cf. Anders et al., 2010), predictive validity of the teacher judgment measure can be assumed. Analogously to the teacher judgments we also collected only one item for the confidence judgments. Reporting reliability estimates for the confidence judgments is thus not possible, too.