Similar personalities lead to poor judgment
 

When a teacher has a similar personality to a student, it can bias the teacher's judgment; that's the finding of a recent study in Germany.
 

The researchers looked at 94 teachers and 293 of their students, all of whom were in Grade 8. Teachers and students undertook a personality survey, and researchers compared the performance of the students on math and reading comprehension tests. Teachers were also asked how they thought the children would do in the test generally (a global judgment) and on a number of specific questions (a task-specific judgment).
 

The results showed that, when teachers and students had a similar personality, the teacher tended to give the student a higher rating on the global judgment. 

However, the similarity had little impact on the teacher's task-specific judgment. The researchers suggest that, when considering a global judgment, teachers do not consider the specifics of how the individual student might approach a test, and instead fall back on more subjective opinion.

Johns Hopkins University 

Research in Brief

News Blast