Improving the Quality of Education in Developing Countries: An Experimental Evaluation of Teacher Training Programs in El Salvador

Abstract:

Carla Coccia, Martina Jakob, Aymo Brunetti, Konstantin Büchel, Ben Jann

Quality education is one of the Sustainable Development Goals advocated by the United Nations, but many developing countries are still far from reaching this target. In the last decades, low and middle income countries have made impressive progress in raising school enrollment. Yet, their productivity in converting educational investments into human capital remains low, as international student assessments highlight. In response to these findings, the World Bank dedicated its World Development Report 2018 to what was declared a global "learning crisis". Recent data from Africa, Asia, and Latin America shows that poorly qualified teachers – both in terms of pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge – are a key barrier to more effective schooling systems, and that the learning crisis in developing countries is, to a large degree, a direct consequence of a teaching crisis. Without joint efforts, this situation is likely to reproduce itself: Many of today's poorly qualified teachers will continue teaching for years to come and consequently shape tomorrow's teachers. Despite a growing consensus that inadequate teaching quality lies at the heart of the learning crisis, potential solutions to address the issue have remained understudied. Teacher training programs may be a promising strategy to cut through the outlined vicious cycle that plagues many schooling systems. The main goal of our project is to assess the potential of such programs to raise student learning outcomes in a context that is characterized by a twin deficit among teachers: a lack of both pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. We further aim to analyze how gains in teachers' competencies are passed on to students, and how training programs should be designed to optimize their effectiveness. We are particularly interested in quantifying the relative efficacy of pedagogical and content-related training elements, and whether combining them unfolds relevant complementarities. To study these questions, we collaborated with educational experts and Consciente, an NGO specialized in evidence-based schooling projects. Our team of economists, sociologists, and educational scientists has designed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that targets 338 primary schools and approximately 7200 students in El Salvador. Its core features three teacher training programs focusing on either (i) pedagogical knowledge, (ii) content knowledge, or (iii) a combination of both inputs, referred to as pedagogical content knowledge. In 2022, primary school math teachers participated in either a control group without any training or in one of these training programs that shared a common basic framework combining face-to-face meetings, coaching elements, and self-study modules. To quantify the impact of the interventions, we collected comprehensive data on teacher competence (i.e. content knowledge through math assessments, teaching practices through classroom observations) as well as student learning outcomes in math across two consecutive school years (2022 and 2023). In the proposed talk we will present short- and long-term results of our interventions and shed light on possible answers to the important but largely understudied question of how to advance educational quality in a schooling system staffed with poorly qualified teachers.