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THE VALUE OF TEACHERS' RATINGS OF THE ADJUSTMENT OF THEIR PUPILS *
Author(s) -
THORPE J. G.
Publication year - 1959
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1959.tb01500.x
Subject(s) - neuroticism , psychology , extraversion and introversion , sociometric status , test (biology) , developmental psychology , social psychology , personality , big five personality traits , paleontology , biology
S ummary . The present experiment was designed to test the relationship between teachers' ratings of adjustment and maladjustment, and more objective estimates obtained by psychological testing. Three groups of thirty‐six children were built up—a group of most adjusted, a group of least adjusted, and a group selected at random. Objective tests of neuroticism which had been shown previously to distinguish between neurotic and normal children were found, with the exception of the Sociometric test, not to differentiate between these three groups. The results indicated that, if the battery of neuroticism tests is an acceptable criterion of neuroticism, the teachers' ratings of adjustment bore no relation to this criterion. It may be argued, however, that the criterion was an inadequate indicator of psychiatric abnormalities and, therefore, that it did not follow that teachers were unable to detect these abnormalities. The teachers in this study appeared to be leaning heavily upon the Sociometric status of their pupils for their judgments, a knowledge of which they were bound to have from everyday observation. It is argued that the Sociometric test discriminated between the groups of children selected by the teachers probably by virtue of its projection on to some dimension other than neuroticism. This dimension is possibly that of introversion‐extraversion.