Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP12956
Authors: Tessa Bold; Ezequiel Molina; Deon Filmer; Jakob Svensson
Abstract: In many low income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching and children learn little from attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, we propose a methodology to assess the effect of teacher knowledge on student learning when panel data on students are not available. We show that data on test scores of the current and the previous year’s teachers allows us to estimate a lower bound on the cumulative effect of teacher knowledge on student achievement. With further restrictions on the cumulative student achievement function we can also estimate bounds on both the contemporaneous effect of teacher content knowledge and the extent of fade out of the teachers’ impact in earlier grades. We use these structural estimates to answer two questions. To what extent can shortfalls in teachers’ content knowledge account for the large learning gap observed across countries? How much learning is lost because of misallocation?
Keywords: Human Capital; Education; Production Function
JEL Codes: I21; I25
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Teacher content knowledge (A21) | Student learning (A21) |
| 1 standard deviation increase in teacher content knowledge (A21) | Student learning (A21) |
| Moving a student from the 5th to the 95th percentile of teacher content knowledge distribution (I24) | Student learning (A21) |
| Previous teachers' knowledge (A21) | Student learning (A21) |
| Teacher knowledge (A21) | Learning gap (I24) |
| Teacher knowledge (A21) | Effective education gap in Africa (I24) |