A Gender Bias in Curriculum-Based Measurement across Content Domains: Insights from a German Study

Abstract

By immediately responding to achievement progress data, teachers can improve students’ performance by using curriculum-based measurement. However, there are studies showing that teachers are prone to make biased judgments about the students providing the data. The present investigation experimentally examined whether pre-service teachers in Germany were biased by the use of gender stereotypes when judging students’ achievement derived from progress data. N = 100 pre-service teachers received graphs that depicted the development of either oral reading fluency or math achievement of girls and boys over a time interval of 11 weeks. The results obtained confirmed the hypotheses partially. The participants did not favor girls over boys on average. However, they judged achievement in reading to be higher for girls than for boys, and math achievement to be higher for boys than for girls. The results suggest that gender stereotypes (boys are good at math, girls are good at reading) are still prevalent in pre-service teachers.