Predicting Children's Achievement from Teacher Judgements: An Alternative To Standardized Testing

Abstract

A simple instrument, the Developmental Rating Scale (DRS), was constructed to provide a vehicle for teachers to express their judgements about the academic development of children. Different teachers used this instrument to assess the academic development of the same children at the beginning of pre-kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Teachers also assessed children using the Developmental Profile II (DPII), a widely used commercial test, at the beginning of pre-kindergarten and first grade; and they reported the level at which the children were achieving in reading comprehension and math at the end of first and second grades. Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) total reading and total math scores were obtained on a subsample of the children at the end of second grade. Although the DPII is purported to consist of five dimensions, corresponding to five different developmental areas, and the DRS, modeled after the DPII, used the same five dimensions, factor analysis indicated that both instruments consisted of one global dimension, not five. The DPII was not a meaningful predictor of any of the achievement variables. The DRS had high correlations with all achievement variables, indicating that from pre-kindergarten through second grade teacher judgements are superior to at least one commercial, standardized test for predicting later achievement.