Teachers' judgment from a European psychosocial perspective

The role that school evaluation, diplomas, degrees, educational and career counseling, and the selection and promotion of individuals play in our societies is of such importance that it would be unwise to ignore the mechanisms that form the basis of different types of judgment. The starting point of judgment production is the production of inferences based on information, which implies several steps. The European approach emphasizes that school judgment should be conceived as a psychology of everyday life, where dynamics are rather similar both at school and in everyday activities (Monteil, 1989). The main approaches that could be integrated, in order to obtain a better understanding of the construction process of teachers’ school judgment are three: social representations (Moscovici, 1976; Mugny & Carugati, 1985/1989), the socio-cognitive approach to judgment production (Dubois, 2003), and the theoretical grid of levels of analysis (Doise, 1982/1986). According to the latter approach, context could be analyzed at the interindividual, situational, cultural and ideological level. The most important contribution of this analytical distinction refers to the possibility of articulating these levels as sources of possible influence of a variable at a given level on other variables at another level. The approach formulated by Doise provides the framework for presenting a research review on different levels of contextual effects on teachers’ judgments. In particular, this chapter will explore research contributions which show that: 1) culturally shared social representations of intelligence in terms of innate gift might influence teachers’ judgments of their pupils (Carugati & Selleri, 2004); 2) teachers' evaluations are affected by social norms and causal explanations of pupils' failure vs. success. (Matteucci, 2007); 3) pupils’ academic performance normally takes place in complex social contexts (typically classrooms) whose features affect individuals' cognitive functioning (e.g., presence of others, visibility, social comparison, self-categorization processes: Monteil & Huguet, 1999), and may either improve or disrupt such performance, depending on students' past history of success vs. failure in similar evaluative tasks. Finally, the “key theme” of evaluation in virtual contexts (ICT) will be investigated by exploring the role of technical artifacts as a special kind of contextual determinants of learners' web actions. The “state of the art” of evaluation and new technologies will then be discussed, with a particular focus on which activities can be tracked and evaluated, in relation to the current development of web–tools. (Mazzoni, 2006). While exploring the several contextual factors that are likely to influence education and the production of teachers’ judgment, this chapter will deal with some implications, which refer to practical aspects of teachers’ activity.