The Accuracy of Students’ Judgments of Their Teacher’s Opinions

Abstract

THE PURPOSE of this study is to determine if certain characteristics of elementary-school pupils contribute to the accuracy of their understanding of their teacher's opinions. Although the concept of interpersonal perception has generated much re search in recent years, little of it has been applied to classroom situations. And though researchers and educators have been concerned much of late over the teacher variables which contribute to a de sirable teacher-student relationship, we have ig nored the student variables. This study attempts to shed some light on these. What might be theorized as the qualities in a stu dent which would cause him to estimate his teach er's opinions more accurately? One of these is high intelligence. Reviews of research on interper sonal perception (2, 7) indicate that a person's ac curacy level is usually related to his IQ. Most studies have used adult subjects, but one, by Miller (6), was directed toward interpersonal perception in elementary school children. Those children su perior in intelligence were found to be better judges of other pupils' sociometric status, while retarded children (in the same classes) were found to be the poorest. But the level of intelligence was also pos itively related to sociometric status, and the latter could have been the determining variable in the above relationship. No study seems to have focused on relating intelligence level to accuracy in the pre diction of teachers' opinions. If intelligence is related to the accuracy of inter personal perception, it should follow that level of achievement will be also, as the two are usually highly correlated. One study (4) indicates that achievement in college students, as measured by their honor point ratios, is related to their accuracy in estimating roommates' responses to a person ality inventory (r of +. 37, significant at . 01 level). From this finding, Chambers (4), making the as sumption that accuracy in interpersonal perception is a generalized ability, concludes that itisadeter minant which contributes to scholastic achievement even after the effects of intelligence have been par tialled out. He finds apartial correlation between accuracy and honor point ratio of +. 35, after con trolling for the effects of intelligence, and con cludes that empathy (or interpersonal perception) evidently is the different quality which enables the student to have scholastic success i n spite o f 1 ow scholastic aptitude (4:284). Such a finding gives some credence to the idea that there is some gener alizability of skill in interpersonal perception.