Browsing by Subject "education quality"

Whereas primary school enrolment has grown to be nearly universal on a global scale, learning results have not kept up with the rapidly expanding systems. This is particularly true in Mozambique, where fourth-grade students lack basic skills of literacy and numeracy. Research has established that teacher quality has a large effect on student achievement. Out of the observable teacher characteristics, teacher content knowledge has most consistently been found to have a positive impact on student achievement. This study seeks to answer how large a causal impact teacher content knowledge has on student achievement in Mozambican primary schools. The data for this study come from a Service Delivery Indicator survey in Mozambique from 2014. They include assessments of fourth-grade students and their teachers in math and Portuguese, and are nationally representative. The empirical analysis exploits within-student across-subject variation. This allows to introduce not only student fixed effects, but also teacher fixed effects into the model, because all students in the sample are taught by a same teacher in both subjects, therefore strengthening the causal identification. First-differencing is then used to derive the estimable equation, which explains student achievement by teacher content knowledge only. The main results suggest that teacher content knowledge in math and Portuguese does not have a statistically significant impact on student achievement. However, further analyses show that there is considerable heterogeneity in the results. This is not unexpected, as Mozambique itself is a rather heterogenous country with large contrasts. Increasing teacher content knowledge by 1 SD increases student achievement by 0.14 SD among students with Portuguese as their first language, and by 0.13 SD among students in urban schools. Increasing the content knowledge of teachers whose knowledge is above the median also increases the achievement of students whose knowledge is above the median by over 0.12 SD. Based on the results, it is plausible that students’ poor knowledge of Portuguese is a fundamental problem for their learning, and something that should be prioritised. This could be done by improving language education at the earlier grades, or by expanding bilingual education, for instance. Because students with their knowledge below the median are unaffected by teacher content knowledge, this suggests that teaching is perhaps targeted to the more advanced students, and those who have already fallen behind benefit very little from it.