Diagnostic competence of primary school teachers in estimating future school achievements: Ecological validity of vignettes - OEKOVALID

The project deals with teachers‘ competency in assessing students in order to make school transition recommendations.

Coordination: Prof. Dr. Sabine Krolak-Schwerdt
Collaborators: Dipl.-Psych. Thomas Hörstermann
In cooperation with: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Gräsel (Bergische Universität Wuppertal, BUW) and Dipl.-Psych. Ines Nölle (BUW)
Funding:  Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Duration:  2010-2012

Abstract

The project deals with teachers‘ competency in assessing students in order to make school transition recommendations.
In the first phase of the project, we present case descriptions to teachers in a variety of experimental conditions. We
assume that teachers‘ assessment competence can be observed through the judgments they make on the basis of these
case descriptions. However, this assumption can be criticized. It raises the methodological question of whether judgments
based on case descriptions are ecologically valid, i.e. whether this scenario can be used to represent the real context of
decision making, where teachers use complex context and student traits in order to make their school transition recommendations.
The second phase of our project focuses on this question. We explore the extent to which students in case
descriptions are judged differently than teachers‘ own, real students (Experiment 1) and how the variation of contextual
information in the case description affects teachers‘ information search and recommendations (Experiment 2).