Test- or judgement-based school track recommendations: Equal opportunities for students with different socio-economic backgrounds?

BACKGROUND: There are concerns that school track recommendations that are mostly based on teachers' judgements of students' performance ('judgement-based recommendations') are more biased by students' SES than school track recommendations that are mostly based on standardized test results ('test-based recommendations'). A recent policy reform of the Dutch educational system has provided us the unique opportunity to compare the effects of students' SES on these two types of track recommendations. AIMS: The aim of this study was to examine the differences between test-based and judgement-based recommendations regarding the direct and indirect effect of students' SES at student level and school level. SAMPLE: The sample consisted of 8,639 grade 6 students from 105 Dutch primary schools. METHODS: Data were analysed using two-level multilevel mediation models. RESULTS: Track recommendations were higher for high-SES students. This was mostly due to differences in students' prior performance. SES also had a small, direct effect on judgement-based, but not on test-based recommendations. The effects were partly situated at school level. CONCLUSION: Overall, the results indicated that teachers based their track recommendations mostly on students' prior performance without being biased by students' SES.

Teachers' monitoring of students' text comprehension: can students' keywords and summaries improve teachers' judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students' learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, -.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (-.38 for students, -.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students' comprehension of six texts without knowing the students' names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (-.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students' learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.