No abstract

Despite the growing attention on teachers’ grading practices in educational research, less attention has been dedicated to the consequences of teachers’ grading standards on students’ educational outcomes, especially in early stages of their scholastic career. This paper aims at filling this gap, analyzing the impact of teacher’s severity in grading on students’ competences development and academic track enrollment, and how it varies according to students’ gender, socio-economic background and immigrant status. The analysis relies on Italian INVALSI-SNV data: information on 5th graders and their teachers are linked, and pupils are followed up to 8th and 10th grade, in which their competences and school track are recorded. Trough 2SLS regressions we demonstrate that being exposed to stricter grading in 5th grade leads to higher students’ competences later on, and to higher probability to enroll in the most prestigious academic track, with no notable heterogeneous effects across students with different sociodemographic characteristics.

We study which students’ characteristics teachers take into consideration when grading German pupils in lower secondary schools, analysing gender mismatches between teachers’ grading and test scores. We assess gender gaps along the distribution of grades across two subjects considering an extensive set of measures of students’ personality traits, school-related attitudes, and behaviors. Relying on the German National Educational Panel Study – Starting Cohort 3, we focus on 7th grade students in 2012. Results from multilevel regression models indicate that girls with the same subject-specific competences as boys obtain on average higher grades in language. The KHB decomposition method suggests that girls’ advantages in grades can be explained mainly by their higher levels of conscientiousness and subject-specific interest.

We investigate social inequalities based on social background in the choice of the academic track among equally performing students, and how indicators derived from the rational choice framework contribute to account for such inequalities. We discuss the main theoretical concepts underpinning rational choice theory as applied to educational decisions: perceived costs, benefits, and risks of failure; relative risk aversion; and time-discounting preferences. In the empirical section, we use a unique dataset concerning the transition to different tracks in upper secondary school in a large Southern Italian region. By using various regression methods and the Karlson/Holm/Breen decomposition technique, we show that social inequalities in access to the academic track are considerable, even in recent cohorts, and that they are largely not explained by previous academic performance. Indicators linked to key concepts proposed by the rational choice theory—as measured in this study—account, as a whole, for 31% of the gap based on parental education, and for 40% of the gap based on parental occupation. The most important sources of inequalities among those this study examines are the expected benefits associated with the educational alternatives and the time-discounting preferences, while relative risk aversion and the perceived chances of success play negligible roles.