No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines the agreement and accuracy of teachers' judgments of their pupils. The data were collected in a primary school in the Netherlands where four teachers and 87 pupils, ranging from grade 2 to 5 (aged 7 to 10 years), participated in this study. The teachers appeared to make use of the same pupil characteristics and the same scale levels in judging their pupils. These teachers generated pupil characteristics that included sociability, self-confidence, troublesomeness and working attitude, which correspond substantially to the Big Five. However, it was found that teachers are not particularly accurate in judging their pupils. Except for ‘troublesomeness’, there was little correspondence between teachers' ratings of pupils and the behavior of those pupils in the classroom, observed independently by ‘naive’ observers. Clearly, teacher judgments are very important and often play a decisive role in children's school careers. Higher levels of agreement and — in particular — accuracy are therefore needed in teachers' judgments. This study implies that specific elaborations of the central constructs of the critical realistic approach to personality judgment agreement and accuracy can be useful in describing and assessing judgments made by individual teachers.

Summary: Self-report questionnaires are susceptible to social desirability, and applicants can adapt their answers to job requirements. To combat social-desirable responding, subjects are asked to answer spontaneously and not think too long about their answer. Hofstee (1996) faces this problem in a different way by proposing to ask the applicant to answer accountably, in other words, to prove answers through future behavior. In the first study 46 subjects filled in the Big Five under the spontaneous and accountability conditions. Contrary to expectations, there was a small but significant effect. If subjects were asked to give answers they would have to account for, they scored higher on conscientiousness and emotional stability. In the second study subjects filled in the Big Five for two jobs differing in the extent to which the applicant has to manage people or systems. In line with expectations, there was an effect of autonomy but contrary to expectations not of conscientiousness and extroversion. The practical consequences of the accountability instruction for the validity of personality questionnaires and of job types for norms are discussed.