Factors Affecting Achievement Test Scores and Marks of Black and White First Graders

This article has 2 goals. The first is to examine whether children's cognitive growth in first grade as gauged by teachers' marks is affected by the same factors as those that affect their cognitive growth as gauged by the California Achievement Test. Even though children's marks and standardized test scores are correlated, there are many reasons why children's growth as measured by these 2 indicators may not be the same. For example, teachers could mark first-grade students partly on the basis of effort, demographic characteristics, or even their parents' behavior, all criteria to which standardized tests should be insensitive. If the processes underlying the 2 varieties of achievement are different, then the messages students get from teachers that govern their day-to-day activities could undercut the (presumably) more universal kinds of learning measured by standardized tests. The second goal of this article is to shed light on ethnic differences in early school attainment. Minority-group children's test scores do not increase as much over the school year as do majority-group children's, but the reasons for this divergence are not clear. A major finding of this article is that the factors determining teachers' marks and those determining standardized test performance are much more closely matched for white children than for black children. Conduct marks of black students were positively related to the marks they received from first-grade teachers in reading and mathematics but negatively related to their gains on a standardized achievement test over that period. Conduct marks for white students, on the other hand, were positively related to achievement, whether measured by marks or the standardized test. Another notable ethnic difference is that white parents influenced their children's gains on standardized tests in math, but black parents did not.