The influence of halo effects upon teachers' assessments of written work

Abstract

Marking experiments have shown that the ratings awarded to samples of pupils' work can be influenced by such factors as the sex, race, social class and ability of the fictitious authors (Babad, 1980; Guttman and Bar-Tal, 1982; Spear, 1984;Van Oudenhoven and Withag, 1983).This article describes halo effects between perceived competence at and attitudes towards a particular school subject. [...]to investigate halo effects, the experimental write-ups and essays were paired together, and each pair was ascribed to a single pupil. In each case the teachers' assessment of the pupil's attitude towards science and interest in science was influenced more by the standard of the preceding write-up than by the content of the essay, even though teachers had been directed to base their judgement on the essay alone.These relationships indicate that cognitive factors are more salient to judgements than affective factors, even when affective qualities are being judged.