The Impact of Teacher Subject Knowledge on Student Achievement: Evidence from Within-Teacher Within-Student Variation

By J. Metzler, Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2010

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian 6th-grade dataset that tested both students and their teachers in two subjects. We circumvent omitted-variable and selection biases using student and teacher fixed effects and observing teachers teaching both subjects in one-classroom-per-grade schools. After measurement-error correction, one standard deviation in subject-specific teacher achievement increases student achievement by about 10 percent of a standard deviation.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/185c432fc771c966f9034bf71dd7f3b3c051e6e2

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Citations in the corpus

The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers (2017, neutral): “…second.29 Our preferred IV specification suggests that a 1sd increase in teacher test scores increases TVA by 0.30-0.33sd, which is higher than the effects estimated by Metzler and Woessmann (2012) (0.1sd in Peru) but similar in magnitude to the effects estimated by Bold et al. (2017) (0.23sd-0.”
Mathematical content knowledge and knowledge for teaching: exploring their distinguishability and contribution to student learning (2019, background): “For example, Metzler and Woessmann (2010) estimated the causal effect of teachers’ CK on students’ academic achievement.”
Effective teaching in elementary mathematics: Identifying classroom practices that support student achievement (2015, background): “…certification such as Teach for America relative to traditional certification (Clark et al, 2013; Decker, Mayer, & Glazerman, 2004), more experience in the classroom (Chetty et al., 2011; Papay & Kraft, forthcoming; Rockoff, 2004), and stronger content knowledge (Metzler & Woessmann, 2012).”
The more, the better? The impact of instructional time on student performance (2017, methodology): “In order to test if the assumption of homogenous effects is fulfilled, we apply different approaches, including the one suggested by Metzler and Woessmann (2012) with a parametric specification of the unobserved pupil effect and an equation systems approach as in Chamberlain (1982), as well as the…”