Teacher judgments of facets of giftedness

Modern conceptions of giftedness see giftedness as a multifaceted construct that includes students’ cognitive abilities, creativity, and motivation (see Sternberg &

Davidson, 2005). Studies 1 and 2 showed that students’ intelligence is important for teachers’ beliefs and judgments about students’ giftedness. Other research has found that creativity and motivation are also elements of teachers’ beliefs about giftedness (e.g.

Miller, 2009). Study 3 investigated how teachers judge these facets of giftedness among elementary school students whom the teachers nominated for an enrichment program for gifted students. Specifically, teachers rated the following characteristics: cognitive abilities (i.e., verbal abilities, mathematical abilities, and deductive reasoning), creative thinking, and engagement. Teacher ratings of students’ academic achievement but also the congruence between teacher and parent ratings have been found to be related to students’ academic achievement (Südkamp et al., 2012; Brenner & Mistry, 2007; Peet, Powell, & O’Donnel, 1997). Therefore, in Study 3, teacher ratings were, first, compared with parent ratings and, second, teacher-parent congruence was set into relation with students’ school grades.

As previous research on teacher and parent ratings of facets of giftedness have rarely been based on gifted students (cf. Chan, 2000, for gifted secondary school students), the first objective of this study was to expand the body of research with results on teacher and parent ratings of teacher-nominated gifted elementary school students concerning three topics: (a) whether teacher and parent ratings differed in their accuracy

levels, (b) whether teachers and parents were differently affected by halo effects, and, (c) how strongly teachers and parents agreed in their ratings concerning each characteristic.

(a) Teachers’ accuracy levels in rating verbal abilities (r = .35), mathematical abilities (r = .26), and deductive reasoning (r = .24) were mediocre at best. Teacher ratings of creative thinking (r = -.05, ns) and engagement (r = .15, ns) were not significantly correlated with the corresponding student data. Parents’ rating accuracy did not differ significantly from teachers’ accuracy. Therefore, teachers and parents were equally able judges, with low to mediocre accuracy. For engagement, the results were in line with previous research (Helmke & Schrader, 1989; Spinath 2005); however, for cognitive abilities and creativity (Geiser, Mandelman, Tan, & Grigorenko, 2016; Machts et al., 2016; Miller & Davis, 1992; Sommer, Fink, & Neubauer, 2008), previous research not only indicated higher accuracy levels but also that teachers were more accurate judges than parents. Teachers’ and parents’ rating accuracy may have been reduced due to students’ nomination status. This might have been accompanied by beliefs about how gifted students have to be which did not align with these students’ characteristics.

Furthermore, the sample in this study only included teacher-nominated gifted students.

The variance in the facets of giftedness may have been smaller than in samples from general classrooms, resulting in artificially reduced correlations for statistical reasons (Wild, 1993). Moreover, due to teachers’ simultaneous decision to nominate students as gifted, teachers might have (implicitly) used the ratings to confirm their nomination decisions.

(b) As expected and in confirmation of previous work (e.g., Li, Lee, Pfeiffer, &

Petscher, 2008; Peters & Gentry, 2010; Petscher & Li, 2008; Urhahne, 2011), teacher and parent ratings were both affected by halo effects, but teacher ratings more strongly than parent ratings. All correlations between teacher ratings (.49 ≤ r ≤ .79) were higher than the correlations between the student data (|.02| ≤ r ≤ .27), indicating that they connected facets of giftedness more strongly than the student data implied. The ratings pointed to rather homogeneous profiles of teacher-nominated gifted students, although the student data did not support such uniformity and additionally showed a high diversity of strengths and weaknesses in students’ profiles. Similarly, parent ratings (.10 ≤ r ≤ .58) were more strongly intercorrelated than student data, with the exception of the correlation between rated verbal and rated mathematical abilities. However, the correlations between all teacher ratings were higher than between parent ratings, indicating that teachers

differentiated between the different facets of giftedness less than parents did. Fisicaro and Lance (1990) mentioned as one possible reason for halo effects that evaluators might not be able to discriminate between characteristics. The factor analyses in this study did not support this possibility, instead showing the separability of each rated facet of giftedness by teachers and parents. However, halo effects might play a role due to a global impression or a salient characteristic guiding the ratings (Thorndike, 1920). The belief that gifted students are intelligent, creative, and motivated to learn, which has been found for teachers and parents (e.g., Buckley, 1994; Endepohls-Ulpe & Ruf, 2005; Louis, 1992), might have led to the high correlations. Furthermore, Anders, McElvany, and Baumert (2010) investigated teacher ratings and found a global factor for academic achievement that included ratings of cognitive abilities and motivation. As the daily school experiences of teachers are closer to students’ academic achievements than parents’ experiences, such a factor might have guided the teachers and to a lesser degree the parents in their ratings of facets of giftedness.

One result stood out: Teachers in Studies 1 and 2 stated that they tend to see giftedness as domain-specific. However, in Study 3, teachers nominated students whom they saw as rather similarly strong in verbal and mathematical abilities, although the nominated students differed more strongly in these characteristics as determined through test scores. Therefore, there might be a difference between teachers’ explicitly stated beliefs and nomination choices that might reveal their implicit beliefs. The correlation between verbal and mathematical abilities was the lowest of the correlations between teacher ratings. This result might therefore also implicate that within their framework of highly connected characteristics, they had rather domain-specific views. Teachers’

understanding of domain-specific might also be that gifted students are rather similarly (good) in several domains but excellent in one or a few.

(c) The correlations between teacher and parent ratings of the same facet were, as expected from previous research (Geiser et al., 2016; Miller & Davis, 1992), medium for verbal (r = .31) and mathematical abilities (r = .40) and weak for creative thinking (r = .10, ns). Teacher and parent ratings for deductive reasoning (r = .12, ns) were not significantly correlated and both ratings of engagement (r = .28) were rather weakly associated. Both correlations were lower than expected (Chan, 2000; Miller & Davis, 1992). The low to at best mediocre associations between teacher and parent ratings indicated that teachers and parents rated teacher-nominated gifted students very

differently overall. These differences might be explained by the different experiences and relationships teachers and parents had with the students, their different opportunities to observe students’ characteristics, and the rather high level of inference, low observability, and rather high subjectivity of some items (e.g., “understands abstract ideas”, “original solutions”).

The second objective of Study 3 was to examine the effects of congruence in teacher and parent ratings for each facet of giftedness on students’ German and math grades. In alignment with Brenner and Mistry (2007), teachers and parents’ ratings were additively connected to students’ German grades. Therefore, students’ German grades were best when teachers and parents agreed in their high ratings for each of the facets of giftedness, whereas their German grades were worst when both had congruently low ratings.

Concerning math grades, teacher ratings for deductive reasoning and creative thinking, but not parent ratings, were connected to students’ math grades. However, for ratings of mathematical abilities and engagement, moderation analyses showed that high parent ratings reduced the association between teacher ratings and math grades. This moderation led, in alignment with Brenner and Mistry’s (2007) results, to a situation that when teacher ratings were low, high parent ratings were connected to better math grades than in cases of low parent ratings. Therefore, not teacher ratings alone, but mostly the congruence between teacher and parent ratings, have to be considered in examining students’ academic achievement. As the moderation analysis illustrated, teacher-nominated gifted students can benefit from parent ratings of student characteristics when they are higher than teacher ratings, as they soften the effects of teacher ratings on students’ school grades. This effect might be due to supportive family variables.