Head Start teachers' perceptual accuracy of children's approaches to learning: Relations with teacher experiences and personal characteristics

Children's approaches to learning are important to consider as they are associated with their academic development across multiple core content areas. Yet, few of the studies examining teachers' accuracy in perceiving children's approaches to learning explore how teachers' own experiences and characteristics are associated with their perceptions. We applied a multilevel modeling framework to data gathered from 239 teachers and their students (n = 1499) from the 2014 Family and Child Experiences Survey. We found that Head Start teachers tend to overestimate children's approaches to learning, and that a significant amount of the variance in these perceptions is at the teacher/classroom level. Additionally, teachers who receive coaching, are lowly paid, and who have more positive attitudes towards families tend to overestimate their students' approaches to learning. This information can serve to guide schools, parents, policymakers, and teachers themselves towards a heightened awareness of the potential downsides of relying solely on teacher-reported perceptions when attempting to accurately evaluate teacher effectiveness and/or individual student development and can serve to guide practitioners towards teacher-level intervention targets that might yield the most return in efforts to improve the accuracy of teacher reports.