[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8849.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Lost Human Capital : Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Bold,Tessa
  • Filmer,Deon P.
  • Molina,Ezequiel
  • Svensson,Jakob
Abstract
In many low-income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching, and children learn little while attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys of schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper proposes a methodology to assess the effect of teacher subject content knowledge on student learning when panel data on students are not available. The paper shows that data on test scores of the student's current and the previous year's teachers, and knowledge of the correlation structure of teacher knowledge across time and grades, allow estimating two structural parameters of interest: the contemporaneous effect of teacher content knowledge, and the extent of fade out of teacher impacts in earlier grades. The paper uses these structural estimates to understand the magnitude of teacher effects and simulate the impacts of various policy reforms. Shortfalls in teachers'content knowledge account for 30 percent of the shortfall in learning relative to the curriculum, and about 20 percent of the cross-country difference in learning in the sample. Assigning more students to better teachers would potentially lead to substantial cost-savings, even if there are negative class-size effects. Ensuring that all incoming teachers have the officially mandated effective years of education, along with increasing the time spent on teaching to the officially mandated schedule, could almost double student learning within the next 30 years.

Suggested Citation

  • Bold,Tessa & Filmer,Deon P. & Molina,Ezequiel & Svensson,Jakob, 2019. "The Lost Human Capital : Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8849, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8849
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/149531557254443590/pdf/The-Lost-Human-Capital-Teacher-Knowledge-and-Student-Achievement-in-Africa.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Karol Jan Borowiecki & Nicholas Martin Ford & Maria Marchenko, 2023. "Harmonious relations: quality transmission among composers in the very long run," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 27(3), pages 454-476.
    2. Amaro Da Costa Luz Carneiro,Pedro Manuel & Cruz-Aguayo,Yyannu & Intriago,Ruthy & Ponce,Juan & Schady,Norbert Rudiger & Schodt,Sarah, 2022. "When Promising Interventions Fail : Personalized Coaching for Teachers in a Middle-Income Country," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9926, The World Bank.
    3. Jan Bietenbeck & Natalie Irmert & Mohammad Sepahvand, 2022. "Teacher Subject Knowledge, Didactic Skills, and Student Learning in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa," Working Papers ECARES 2022-15, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    4. Busso, Matias & Montaño, Sebastián & Muñoz-Morales, Juan S. & Pope, Nolan G., 2024. "The Unintended Consequences of Merit-Based Teacher Selection: Evidence from a Large-Scale Reform in Colombia," IZA Discussion Papers 17294, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Aymo Brunetti & Konstantin Büchel & Martina Jakob & Ben Jann & Daniel Steffen, 2021. "Inadequate Teacher Content Knowledge and What to Do About It: Evidence from El Salvador," University of Bern Social Sciences Working Papers 41, University of Bern, Department of Social Sciences.
    6. Portner, Claus C., 2023. "How Is Fertility Behavior in Africa Different?," SocArXiv jf9um, Center for Open Science.
    7. Hilmy, Masyhur, 2022. "The Impact of Sending Top College Graduates to Rural Primary Schools," ADBI Working Papers 1328, Asian Development Bank Institute.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8849. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.