What Do Teachers Know and Do? Does it Matter? Evidence from Primary Schools in Africa

By Tessa Bold, Deon Filmer, G. Martin, E. Molina, Christophe Rockmore, Brian Stacy, Jakob Svensson, Waly Wane. 2017

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills?the so-called"learning crisis."This paper uses data from nationally representative surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, representing close to 40 percent of the region's total population, to investigate possible answers to this policy failure by quantifying teacher effort, knowledge, and skills. Averaging across countries, the paper finds that students receive two hours and fifty minutes of teaching per day?or just over half the scheduled time. In addition, large shares of teachers do not master the curricula of the students they are teaching; basic pedagogical knowledge is low; and the use of good teaching practices is rare. Exploiting within-student, within-teacher variation, the analysis finds significant and large positive effects of teacher content and pedagogical knowledge on student achievement. These findings point to an urgent need for improvements in education service delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also provide a lens through which the growing experimental and quasi-experimental literature on education in low-income countries can be interpreted and understood, and point to important gaps in knowledge, with implications for future research and policy design.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c57ea1b19667ef4fef2213661ddc11e27b1c35bc

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Citations in the corpus

Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2016, unknown): “These challenges are not unique to India and similar findings of low teacher human capital and ability to support weaker students is also documented elsewhere; Bold et al. (2017), for example, use primary data from seven sub-Saharan African countries to document that “general pedagogical knowledge a”
Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice (2018, background): “Teachers also scored woefully low in terms of pedagogical knowledge—their ability to prepare a lesson, formulate questions that would elicit student knowledge effectively, and their performance in the classroom (Bold et al. 2017).”
Enrollment without Learning: Teacher Effort, Knowledge, and Skill in Primary Schools in Africa (2017, background): “Roughly half of the students in Uganda, after three years of mathematics teaching, cannot place numbers between 0 and 999 in order (Bold et al. 2017a; ASER 2013).”