This talk presents findings from a project that is studying the relationship between student socioeconomic status (SES)/ethnicity/gender and discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions of the student’s effort, enjoyment, misbehaviour and abilities in school. Academic attitudes have been shown to be important determinants of children’s school attainment and teachers’ perceptions of such attitudes influence how teachers judge their students’ academic abilities. We conducted three studies, each focusing on different student characteristics and attitudes, and asked whether discrepancies (or ‘inaccuracies’) in teachers’ perceptions of students are systematically putting children from certain social groups at disadvantage. In study 1 we examined whether teachers systematically over- or under-estimate the effort and enjoyment of students depending on the student’s SES. We found that, indeed, teachers tend to rate the enjoyment and effort of lower SES-students more negatively and the attitudes of higher SES-students more positively than students own reports would suggest. Study 2 focused on student gender and academic self-concept (‘I am good at math/English’) in different subjects. We studied how discrepancies between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the student’s academic abilities at the end of primary school predict student’s academic self-concept in later years, and how student gender interacts with these processes. It appears that for English teachers’ ‘over-estimation’ of both boys’ and girls’ abilities at age 11 leads to higher English self-concept at age 14. In contrast, for math, ‘under-estimation’ of students’ abilities at age 11 leads to lowered self-concept at age 14, with a particularly strong effect for girls. The aim of Study 3 was to analyse whether student ethnicity is related to discrepancies between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of students’ misbehaviour. Preliminary results are that the behaviour in class of students of Black Caribbean and Black African heritage is perceived more negatively by teachers than students’ own perceptions, while this discrepancy is weaker or reversed for other ethnic groups. We focused on children at the end of primary school and used data on England from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and – for Study 1 – also on Scotland from the Growing Up in Scotland Study (GUS).
