What Do Teachers Know and Do? Does It Matter? : Evidence from Primary Schools in Africa
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...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25964 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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