Een nieuw Zweeds promotieonderzoek, uitgevoerd door Stefan Johansson toont dat er verschillen kunnen zitten in hoe leerkrachten de geletterdheid/taalvaardigheid van leerlingen na een test inschatten, zelfs als leerlingen gelijke scores behalen.

Uit het persbericht:

Stefan Johansson based his doctoral thesis on data from the large-scale literacy study PIRLS 2001, involving more than 11 000 pupils and some 700 teachers from grades 3 and 4 in Sweden. The studied material consisted of teachers’ assessments and pupils’ test results and self-assessed literacy. The teachers responded to 12 different statements about their pupils’ reading and writing skills and assessed their skill levels on a 1-10 scale.

Teachers who had had the same pupils for more than one year showed a higher correspondence between their assessments and the pupils’ test results. The same was true for teachers with higher levels of formal competence, meaning more education and experience.

Moreover, Johansson found large differences in how teachers assessed classes with similar test results.

‘The teachers had different frames of reference. They seem to interpret aims and assessment criteria in many different ways,’ says Johansson.

In addition, girls and students with higher socioeconomic status received somewhat higher scores from the teachers than reflected in the PIRLS test results, which confirms previous research in the area.

‘One way to explain this is that a test doesn’t cover everything in the applicable curricula. So maybe girls are better at demonstrating skills that are not reflected in their test results, such as verbal ability, and then their teachers include these skills in their assessments. Another possibility is that girls show more effort and are given credit for it,’ says Johansson.

Het is niet de verklaring voor minder presteren van jongens in onderwijs (of meer specifiek op taal), maar het is wel een opvallend gegeven dat geslacht een rol speelt in het inschatten van de capaciteiten van een leerling. Johanson pleit verder voor meer onafhankelijke standaardtesten, waar ik zelf dubbele gevoelens bij heb omdat deze dan weer andere problemen meebrengen.