Sources of Bias in Teacher Ratings of Adolescents with ADHD

Abstract

Best practice assessment of childhood ADHD includes behavior ratings from multiple sources across multiple environments. However, adolescents in secondary schools interact with several teachers each day, and research has shown that teacher perceptions of the same child can be highly inconsistent. As a result, rating scale data can be equivocal, depending on which teachers are selected. The intent of the present study was two-fold: 1) to assess the consistency between teacher behavior ratings of adolescents with ADHD, and 2) to explore predictors of rater leniency or severity (i.e., sources of bias). Results suggest that interrater reliability within our sample was moderate, consistent with previous research. Further, teacher characteristics, including sex and age, were related to biases on ratings of student hyperactivity-impulsivity. Specifically, women and younger teachers provided significantly more severe ratings on average than did men and older teachers. Implications for the interpretation and statistical norming of ADHD rating scales are discussed.

The Role of School Psychologists in Supporting Adolescents With ADHD

“…The results of the Colomer et al (2020) study indicate that adolescent appraisals of their achievement are typically as accurate as parent reports and more accurate than teacher reports. This may be because secondary school teachers typically teach more than 100 students per semester, and the inter-rater reliability is low (Schultz & Evans, 2012). A key implication of the current study is that adolescents should also be asked to complete the self-report versions of behavior rating scales, and unless parents or teachers report clinical levels of oppositional behaviors, the adolescent ratings should generally be considered as valid.…”

Do Adolescents With ADHD Have a Self-Perception Bias for Their ADHD Symptoms and Impairment?

“…Adolescent self-reports were more predictive of performance on an objective math task than parent ratings (Chan & Martinussen, 2016), whereas parent-reports were more strongly associated with educational attainment, high school GPA, and vocational performance than were self-reports of young adults with ADHD (Barkley et al, 2002). Although, compared to parent ratings, teacher ratings correlated more strongly with grades (GPA) and impairment (Sibley et al, 2014), inter-rater agreement between teachers on ADHD rating scales is low in secondary school (Evans et al, 2005), and those ratings are subject to rater biases such as teacher sex and age (Schultz & Evans, 2012).…”

Accurate Prediction of Children's ADHD Severity Using Family Burden Information: A Neural Lasso Approach

“…However, several studies have shown that this information can be influenced by the characteristics of the informant. For example, it has been shown that female young teachers tend to provide more severe scores than older male teachers (Schultz and Evans, 2012 ). In another study, Chi and Hinshaw predicted the discrepancies between the reports provided by the mother and the teacher based on the mother's responses to the Beck Depression Inventory (Chi and Hinshaw, 2002 ).…”