What Teachers Believe : Mental Models about Accountability, Absenteeism, and Student Learning
The time teachers spend teaching is low in several developing countries. However, improving teacher effort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult to increase teacher effort? One possibility is that teachers are resistant to increasing effort...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/804301527601436747/What-teachers-believe-mental-models-about-accountability-absenteeism-and-student-learning http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29883 |
| Summary: | The time teachers spend teaching is low
in several developing countries. However, improving teacher
effort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult to
increase teacher effort? One possibility is that teachers
are resistant to increasing effort because they do not
believe their effort is suboptimal. Such beliefs may be
based on their mental models on absenteeism, accountability,
and student learning. This paper explores this idea using
data from 16,000 teachers across eight developing countries,
spanning five regions. It finds that, on average, teachers
support test-based accountability and believe that they are
in fact held accountable for student learning. In several
countries, many teachers tend to normalize two types of
suboptimal behaviors. These are (i) certain types of
absenteeism, and (ii) paying extra attention to
well-performing and well-resourced students. Finally, the
paper shows that ideas of accountability and absenteeism are
strongly framed by context in two direct ways. The first is
whether teachers favor exclusively reward-based forms of
accountability. The second is the degree to which they
support absenteeism linked to community tasks. These results
provide actionable insights on how changing teacher behavior
sustainably might require reshaping underlying mental models. |
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