Teacher Bias and Evaluation Differences in Test Scores: Different Methods for Different Questions

Judith M. Delaney and Paul Devereux

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2025, vol. 87, issue 5, 924-941

Abstract: We study differences in teacher evaluations of student performance relative to those measured by test scores. While much literature is concerned with estimating various types of teacher biases, we show conceptually that there is no single ‘teacher bias’ effect. Even if teachers have no group bias, teacher evaluation differences by group masystematically deviate from test score differences if the distribution of test scores differs across groups. Commonly used approaches are not equivalent and can lead to different conclusions as they target different estimands. We demonstrate our findings using Monte Carlo simulations and, using two recent UK cohort surveys, we show that these conceptual issues matter in practice when we evaluate whether teachers are likely to over‐estimate female performance in English. Finally, we use the methods to examine an issue of substantive importance, gender differences in teacher perceptions in comparative advantage in English relative to mathematics. Our findings suggest that it is unlikely that teacher misperceptions of comparative advantage by gender are an important cause of the gender gap in STEM.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12657

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:obuest:v:87:y:2025:i:5:p:924-941

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0305-9049

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Christopher Adam, Anindya Banerjee, Christopher Bowdler, David Hendry, Adriaan Kalwij, John Knight and Jonathan Temple

More articles in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics from Department of Economics, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().