Preservice teachers’ evaluations of students’ achievement development in the context of school-track recommendations

Abstract

We experimentally examined whether preservice teachers considered both the gender of primary school students and their development of GPAs, indicated by two successive school reports, when making secondary school-track recommendations. We used student vignettes to mimic real students and orthogonally varied student gender, their GPA development (positive vs. negative), and the grand mean of grades. We found that students who improved were more than twice as likely to be recommended for the highest track than those who deteriorated. Moreover, we could show that with deteriorating students, male participants preferred boys relative to girls. These results are discussed regarding possible rules of extrapolating current achievements and concerning the gender of students and participants, and conclusions are drawn with respect to preservice teacher education.