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The authors find that teachers perceive substantial racial-ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender differences in children’s literacy skill.
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The authors find that teachers in lower-socioeconomic-status schools and lower-achieving schools more often underestimate their students’ abilities. These results highlight the importance of recent policy efforts to avoid isolating traditionally disadvantaged children.
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Teacher inaccuracy is rooted far more in the social and academic characteristics of classrooms than in the attributes of teachers themselves. On average in both the fall and spring, teachers in higher-achieving and higher-SES classrooms overestimate their children’s literacy abilities. Teachers tend to underestimate students’ skills in lower achieving and socioeconomically disadvantaged classroom.
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Teachers tend to underestimate the literacy skills of Black children at the start of kindergarten and of boys and lower-SES children throughout kindergarten.
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Classroom academic and socioeconomic composition strongly influence teacher perceptual accuracy.
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Black children in lower-SES classrooms-particularly, lower-SES, lower-achieving classrooms-are more likely to be viewed by their teachers as possessing fewer literacy skills than they actually do.
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Child SES is more strongly associated with teacher perceptual inaccuracy in lower-SES classrooms. Moreover, these negative effects of lower-SES classrooms on teacher perceptual accuracy are amplified for Black (compared to White) children in the fall, even after controlling for other child and classroom characteristics.
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Child SES influences teacher perceptions less in high-SES and high-ability class rooms, but child SES matters more to teacher perceptions in low-SES and lower-ability classrooms.
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Their results suggest that teachers perceive substantial differences in literacy ability across student socio-demographic subgroups.
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In the fall, teachers typically perceive that their students are more alike academically than they actually are. By the spring, however, teachers increasingly recognize that although their students may be socio- demographically similar, they are quite different academically.
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In terms of social class disparities, children given poor literacy ratings by their teachers were typically socioeconomically disadvantaged in comparison to those receiving average rating.