Examining the Role of Poverty in Teacher Grading Decisions (original) (raw)

Poverty has a significant impact on the education of America’s youth, causing an income achievement gap in American PreK-12 schools. A large amount of research has been done on poverty’s effect on many aspects of schools, but few studies have addressed poverty’s role on student grades. A century of grading research has shown that teacher grading practices are rarely an accurate representation of student academic achievement, but rather a construct of unclear meaning containing both objective and subjective factors. Because these practices are so difficult to understand, several studies have investigated teacher grading decision making to attempt a more analytic assessment of the process that produces these grades. The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers’ grading decisions and the relationship to school poverty level in order to better understand the effectiveness of teacher grades in high-poverty schools. Using a causal-comparative design, the study was set in an ...