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Ratings are present in many areas of assessment including peer review of research proposals and journal articles, teacher observations, university admissions and selection of new hires. One feature present in any rating process with multiple raters is that different raters often assign different scores to the same assessee, with the potential for bias and inconsistencies related to rater or assessee covariates. This paper analyzes disparities in ratings of internal and external applicants to teaching positions using applicant data from Spokane Public Schools. We first test for biases in rating while accounting for measures of teacher applicant qualifications and quality. Then, we develop model-based inter-rater reliability (IRR) estimates that allow us to account for various sources of measurement error, the hierarchical structure of the data, and to test whether covariates, such as applicant status, moderate IRR. We find that applicants external to the district receive lower ratings for job applications compared to internal applicants. This gap in ratings remains significant even after including measures of qualifications and quality such as experience, state licensure scores, or estimated teacher value added. With model-based IRR, we further show that consistency between raters is significantly lower when rating external applicants. We conclude the paper by discussing policy implications and possible applications of our model-based IRR estimate for hiring and selection practices in and out of the teacher labor market.
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What Do Peer Evaluations Represent? A Study of Rater Consensus and Target Personality
When professors assign group work, they assume that peer ratings are a valid source of information, but few studies have evaluated rater consensus in such ratings. We analyzed peer ratings from project teams in a second-year university course to examine consensus. Our first goal was to examine whether members of a team generally agreed on the competence of each team member. Our second goal was to test if a target’s personality traits predicted how well they were rated. Our third goal was to evaluate whether the self-rating of each student correlated with their peer rating. Data were analyzed from 130 students distributed across 21 teams (mean team size = 6.2). The sample was diverse in gender and ethnicity. Social relations model analyses showed that on average 32% of variance in peer-ratings was due to “consensus,” meaning some targets consistently received higher skill ratings than other targets did. Another 20% of the variance was due to “assimilation,” meaning some raters consistently gave higher ratings than other raters did. Thus, peer ratings reflected consensus (target effects), but also assimilation (rater effects) and noise. Among the six HEXACO traits that we examined, only conscientiousness predicted higher peer ratings, suggesting it may be beneficial to assign one highly conscientious person to every team. Lastly, there was an average correlation of.35 between target effects and self-ratings, indicating moderate self-other agreement, which suggests that students were only weakly biased in their self-ratings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1730262
- PAR ID:
- 10335853
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Education
- Volume:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2504-284X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.746457
