Intervention strategies to improve the quality of teachers´ judgments: Changes in the accuracy of teachers´ transition decisions

This paper focuses on intervention modules to improve teachers’ diagnostic competence, especially in regards to decisions on students’ transition from primary to secondary education. Although these transition decisions should be based on academic achievement, research has shown non-academic variables to influence decisions, leading to disadvantages for specific groups of students. Using an experimental pre-post design, we investigated the short and long term effects of accountability, theoretical knowledge and the application of prediction rules on teachers’ judgment accuracy, respectively. Pre-intervention data showed that although teachers’ decision accuracy was of high standard, decision accuracy for ethnic majority students was significantly higher than for ethnic minority students. Increased accountability resulted in increased decision accuracy, especially in regards to decisions for ethnic minority students. Similarly, the introduction of theoretical models of decision making and judgment formation and the application of prediction rules also resulted in an improvement of transition decisions but only for ethnic minority students. Unfortunately, the differential intervention effects of the intervention modules could not be maintained over time, that is, at follow up, the ethnicity bias reappeared. From these studies we can conclude that all three intervention modules can improve the accuracy of teachers’ transition decisions. In line with the intention of the interventions, the disproportionally high rate of decision errors for ethnic minority students observed pre-intervention was eliminated post-intervention and in line with error rates for ethnic majority students. However, training or instruction should be repeated briefly before making such judgments as their influence was not maintained over time.