Teacher assessment of student reading skills as a function of student reading achievement and grade

This paper investigates teacher ratings in relation to the student test score in PIRLS 2001. Teacher assessment relates to concerns of equity and equality, and of making correct judgments of the students’ skills. It is thus crucial for a teacher to think about these issues. But do teachers assess the same skills equally? Previous research suggests that teacher assessments lack in equality. As an extension of the PIRLS 2001 study, Swedish teachers rated each and every student on 18 different statements about students’ literacy skills on a scale ranging from 1-10. It is therefore possible to investigate the relationship between teacher ratings and student achievement in reading literacy. The analysis was conducted in three steps. First a two-level model was fitted to the data and the variance of the teacher ratings were studied by creating a latent model of the teacher ratings. Second students’ achievement was used to explain variance between both students and teachers. In a later step effects of students’ grade and teacher background were examined. Results show that the variance among the teacher ratings was high and that a substantial part of the variance was due to between class differences. The variance at the within class level was to a large degree accounted for by student achievement. No substantial effect arose when introducing explanatory indicators, such as teachers education or experience to account for the between class differences in teachers ratings. However, grade had a significant effect on the level of ratings between classes. Grade 3 teachers tended to rate their students higher than did the grade 4 teachers at the same performance level.