THE EFFECT OF IMPLICIT THEORIES ON RATERS INFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE JUDGMENT - CONSEQUENCES FOR THE VALIDITY OF STUDENT-RATINGS OF INSTRUCTION

Performance judgment is a situation of incomplete information where ra ters' inference would play an important role. Consequently, the schema tic nature of human cognition may introduce implicit personality theor y bias in performance judgment. To demonstrate this, a causal model of performance rating judgment was framed from Be theories of person per ception and social cognition. The model yielded a good fit to the data obtained from a performance rating task where the availability of per formance information was manipulated. The results supported the hypoth eses that student raters' inferences are partly contaminated by their implicit theories of a good instructor. Student raters inferred traits and behaviors and provided ratings for corresponding items even when the instructor behavior was limited to a subset of performance data on ly. The findings imply that one aspect of invalidity in student rating s of instructors is the bias in human inference due to the implicit th eories of effective instructional behavior.