How fairly am I assessing my students? Equipping teachers with a tool to learn about their own assessment practices: Theory and development of the Fairness Barometer.

It seems safe to say that the vital question of adequacy, precision, and fairness of grades is as old as the introduction of a grading system to schools and other educational institutions. In recent years, however, this topic has attracted a lot of research interest. Particularly in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, teacher accountability and how to measure it have become increasingly important to educational actors and researchers alike (Levy, Keller, Brunner, Fischbach, 2017). Consequently, multiple studies have examined teachers’ diagnostic abilities, especially their accuracy in assessing students’ competencies (e.g. Kaiser, Südkamp, Möller, 2017; Schrader, 2013; Südkamp, Kaiser, Möller, 2012; Tobisch & Dresel, 2017). The present paper complements this view by discussing a newly developed questionnaire that captures whether students themselves feel that they are being assessed in a fair and just way by their teachers: the Fairness Barometer. Capturing three different dimensions of fairness (informational fairness, interpersonal fairness, and procedural fairness), the questionnaire is intended to be administered by teachers who want to learn more about their own assessment practices through student feedback. By exclusively considering strategies and behaviors teachers can change, the Fairness Barometer provides clear guidance for improving current assessment practices; its questions were also carefully selected to avoid provoking unrealistic expectations in students. On the basis of two studies measuring perceived teacher fairness in the subjects Mathematics, English, and German among roughly 600 students, we will discuss the factorial structure of the Fairness Barometer and the relationship between fairness and self-reported grades. Results are promising and show that students of all competency levels are capable of judging their teachers’ assessment practices in a nuanced way. By developing the Fairness Barometer, we hope to equip teachers with a tool that is easy to administer and actually helps them to develop and improve their often criticized diagnostic competencies.