Teacher evaluation of student ability: what roles do teacher gender, student gender, and their interaction play?

Background: Recent decades have been marked by an extensive movement to analyze
bias in people’s thinking, especially in gender-related issues. Studies have
addressed the question of gender bias in classrooms on different levels—the use of
gender in books, learning opportunities determined by students’ gender, or teachers’
gender preferences.
Purpose: In this study, we aim to answer the question of whether and under which
circumstances the interaction between teacher gender and student gender positively
or negatively influences teachers’ evaluations of students’ performance, while controlling
for objective measures of students’ performance. For instance, it could be
possible that a teacher with the same gender as a student evaluates the student as better
than opposite-gender students, independent of their objective performance.
Sample: The sample consisted of n > 1,500 Finnish 6th grade students (Mage= 12.67)
and their respective class teachers.
Design and methods: Students completed several academic skills tests, including a
mathematical thinking test, reading comprehension test, and scientific reasoning test.
Furthermore, teachers provided their evaluation of each student, evaluating students’
performance in different school subjects and answering questions regarding their
probability of academic success. To test whether the teacher-student gender interaction
had an effect on the criterion variable, i.e. teachers’ evaluation of the students’
performance, multilevel analyses accounting for between- and within-class effects
were applied. Thereby, the effect of students’ objective performance on teachers’
evaluation of the students and main effects of gender were controlled for as covariates.
Results: The main results indicated that the interaction between student and teacher
gender did not influence teachers’ evaluation of the students. However, regardless of
their gender, teachers tended to evaluate girls as better than boys in first language
performance (i.e. Finnish language) and potential for success in school. Teacher
gender did not influence the evaluation.
Conclusions: The results of the study suggest that the interaction between teacher
and student gender is unlikely to be a source of possible bias in the evaluations of
students in the Finnish educational system.