Who gets good grades, who is fairly judged and who repeats a grade? Links between teacher decisions and students' personalities

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Teacher-assigned grades and teachers' decisions to keep students back a year can decisively influence educational trajectories. When teachers assign grades and decide whether a student will advance into the next form, teachers don't base their judgments solely on indicators of achievement. The present project aims to clarify whether teachers take students' personality characteristics (Big Five) into account when assigning grades and when deciding on whether students will graduate into the next form. We will also consider differential effects of students' personalities for male and female students. In addition, we will analyze whether teachers are able to more accurately judge students with certain personality characteristics. The study will be based on data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). As a representative longitudinal study with a very large sample (N = 16.425 ninth grade students), the NEPS is well suited to the present investigation. In Study 1, we will use multilevel regression analyses to predict teacher-assigned grades from students' personality characteristics. In Study 2, we will conduct multilevel logistic regression to predict grade retention from students' personality characteristics. We will also take students' achievements in standardized tests into consideration, as well as their self-concepts, family backgrounds, and the classroom's average achievement.