UC Merced

While education scholars have discussed differing perceptions of students’ academic skills by race, little is known about differences in perceptions due to developmental disabilities. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, First Grade Waves, this study pushes forward what is already known about teacher perceptions by exploring whether a diagnosis of ADHD leads to differing teacher evaluations in science, math, and reading. Results do indicate that teachers are more likely to perceive students with ADHD as lower performing than their peers without ADHD. This pattern remains significant despite the addition of control variables. These students with ADHD are being rated worse even when this assumption is not warranted. This paper also discusses implications for education scholarship, and the study of developmental disabilities in an academic setting.