Factors Influencing Fairness in Classroom Assessment

Seminar paper from the year 2025 in the subject Didactics - Politics, Political Education, grade: 1, PH Oberoesterreich, language: English, abstract: Classroom assessment is mostly conceptualized as a neutral and objective mechanism that attempts to assess the academic performance of students. But an increasing body of educational literature indicates that assessment experiences are influenced by social, linguistic, and relational conditions such as influences on how students’ performance is understood and assessed. Seeing it this way, fairness in classroom assessment cannot be limited under uniform standards only but involves a reflection on students’ language competences, their social context, and the expectations of teachers. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1971) put it, the education system does not create equal opportunities but rather reproduces and legitimises social inequalities. Accordingly, classroom assessment could serve as a means of receiving reinforcement for socially prized linguistic, behavioural, and cultural forms in the lesson, and to infer that deviance from these values indicates low performance or effort. This view illustrates what assessment practices can do to the privilege of students whose linguistic repertoires and sociial dispositions accommodate to institutional expectations without realising this, complicating the notion that fairness equals equal treatment. Based on this background, in this paper, a view is drawn on how fairness in classroom assessment is influenced by factors beyond formal grading standards. In particular, it explores the research question in the following fashion: What influence do students’ language competences, social background, and teachers’ implicit expectations have on the fairness of an assessment in the classroom?