Introduction and Initial Exploration of 'Situated Attainment': Differences in Ranked IQs and In-Class Attainment.

Situated Attainment (SA) is a within-class concept that allows the exploration of why teachers award some students higher or lower grades than their intelligence might warrant. A student's SA is operationally defined as the difference in ranks between the grade awarded by the teacher and the student's intelligence quotient (IQ). For this initial exploration of the concept, 9 classes of grade 9 students were selected, a total of 319. These students responded to an attitude questionnaire and a subset of culturally and psychometrically appropriate IQ questions from the General Ability Tests 2. Half-year results from which grades were derived were also recorded. The theoretical assumptions if using class as the unit of analysis, school as the unit of analysis, and student as the unit of analysis were supported, and further analysis using the SA metric showed that teachers were not gender biased in their grading of males and females relative to their IQs. The SA analysis revealed teachers extreme grading bias with respect to the student's age (95.8%) and a bias toward students' attitudes. The study reveals the negative effect of continued underachievement on students' self-esteem and shows that 62.5% of student dissatisfaction with low grades was the result of underachievement rather than lack of ability. (Contains 5 tables and 39 references.) (SLD)