Assessing teachers' judgements of students' academic motivation and emotions across two rating methods

Abstract

The present study examines the accuracy of teachers' judgements about students' motivation and emotions in English learning with two different rating methods. A sample of 480 sixth-grade Chinese students reported their academic self-concept, learning effort, enjoyment, and test anxiety via a questionnaire and were rated on these dimensions by their 16 English teachers with single general and multiple specific items. Both single- and multiple-item ratings consistently show that teachers could rank students' academic self-concept, learning effort, and enjoyment with medium to high accuracy except test anxiety. It suggests that teachers should attend more to students' test anxiety to make accurate judgements. No differences were found between the two rating methods when comparing correlations and percentage agreement. It implies that the single-item rating could be adopted as an alternative to measure teachers' judgements of students' domain-specific motivation and emotions. To generalize the findings, further motivational and emotional constructs should be examined.

Keywords:

• teacher judgement accuracy
• students’ motivation and emotions
• rating methods

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jiannong Shi from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, and Chenghong Jing from the Cadres Training Department, Chaoyang Branch, Beijing Institute of Education, for the great help during data collection, and Borah Lee from the University of Munich for proofreading the article.

Notes on contributors

Mingjing Zhu is a full-time doctoral student at the faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Munich, Germany. Her research interests are mainly in teacher judgement of students' academic achievement, motivation, and emotion, especially from a domain-specific perspective. She is interested in accuracy measurement as well as influences of teachers' judgements on student outcomes.

Detlef Urhahne is a Professor of Psychology with special emphasis on Educational Psychology at the University of Passau, Germany. His research interests cover different areas such as teacher education, motivation and emotion, e-learning, science learning, and high-ability studies.