Exploring the Sense of Justice about Grades

This paper investigates children's ideas of justice about grades. We focus on the justice evaluation and the justice index, the actual and just gender grades gaps, and the mechanisms by which actual and just grades are produced. Using data from a large survey of junior high school students carried out in Israel in 1986, we estimate actual and just grade functions, separately for boys and girls in the eighth and ninth grade-levels, representing 271 classrooms in 47 schools. To pinpoint the differential operation of gender, ability, ethnicity, and parental schooling in the determination of the actual and just grades, controlling for classroom effects, we test a variety of parameter-equality hypotheses.