Learning Job Skills from Colleagues at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment Using Teacher Performance Data

By J. Papay, Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler, Mary Laski. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2016

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study a program designed to encourage learning from coworkers among school teachers. In an experiment, we document gains in job performance when high- and low-skilled teachers are paired and asked to work together on improving their skills. Pairs are matched on specific skills measured in prior evaluations. Each pair includes a target teacher who scores low in one or more of 19 skills and a partner who scores high in (many of) the target’s deficient skills. Student achievement improved 0.12 standard deviations in low-skilled teachers’ classrooms. Improvements are likely the result of target teachers learning skills from their partner. (JEL I21, J24, J45, M53)

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe6440d4279840a37d296f95036b778443c458cf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. David K. Evans
2. Anna Popova
3. Mary E. Breeding
4. M. Damgaard
5. Violeta C. Arancibia
6. Helena Skyt Nielsen
7. Katharine M. Conn

Citations in the corpus

• Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice (2018, background): “In high-income countries, Kennedy (2019) proposes that the impact of teacher PD programs be benchmarked against a much less costly “community of practice” model in which teachers help each other, like Papay et al. (2020).”
• Nudging in education (2018, background): “A common feature of the interventions in Pistolesi (2017), Bandiera et al.”