Teachers' Evaluations and the Definition of the Situation inthe Classroom

The theoretical contribution of this paper is to regard teachers’ evaluations with a prognostic claim aboutstudents’ future academic ability as a result of a special social situation in the classroom. We assume thatafter teachers have framed the social situation, particular scripts of action will determine the criteria onwhich teachers ground their evaluations. In concrete terms, we propose a theoretical approach thatintegrates existing meritocratic and ‘habitus’ explanations in the comprehensive framework of frameselection theory with its important distinction between a more automatic and a more rational type ofinformation processing.Our empirical contribution is to test the hypotheses that we deduced from our theoretical assumptions in aset of structural equation models. Using data from the Cologne High School Panel (CHiSP), we find thateven when controlling for the path structure of the model, indicators for both kinds of concepts arestatistically significant. However, regardless of the underlying type of information processing, thepredictive power of indicators operationalizing the meritocratic explanation is comparatively higher.