How accurately do teachers’ judge students? : Re-analysis of Hoge and Coladarci (1989) meta-analysis

Abstract

In order to tailor the educational context to students’ individual needs, teachers must accurately judge their students’ abilities. Educational researchers and practitioners thus need robust estimates of teachers’ judgment accuracy and also need to understand how it can be improved. In the current study, we use a modern, psychometric meta-analytical approach to re-analyze the data from Hoge and Coladarci (1989) seminal, descriptive review of teachers’ judgment accuracy. Replication scientists advise first re-analyzing data before examining whether a new study produces the same results. We therefore conduct an important first step in checking whether their results can be replicated. We were particularly interested in whether correcting for artifacts and publication bias would lead to a new estimate of teachers’ judgment accuracy and whether there was evidence of potential moderators (subject, student learning disability, student grade level). The results indicate that Hoge and Coladarci (1989) underestimated teachers’ judgment accuracy (r = 0.65 in the original study versus r = 0.80 in the current study). We found no evidence that teachers’ judgment accuracy differed between “classical” or social judgment theory tasks, nor did we find evidence that teachers’ judgment accuracy depended on subject (language/mathematics/miscellaneous), whether students had a learning disability, or grade level. Consistent with previous research, our results demonstrate the importance of correcting for artifacts and publication bias when conducting meta-analyses. Future studies should use our psychometric approach to (re)analyze and systematically compare different samples of studies on teachers’ judgment accuracy.