Using Screening Assessments to Recruit Effective Teachers: Experimental Evidence from Ecuador

Maria Daniela Araujo Piedra, Yyannu Cruz-Aguayo and Guido Heineck

No 14251, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has required teacher candidates to pass cognitive and knowledge tests before they are allowed to participate in merit-based competitions for tenured positions. We evaluate this policy by linking administrative teacher information to data from an experimental study that randomly assigned nearly 13,000 children to their teachers. We find that test-screened tenured teachers had a significant effect of at least 10.5 percent of a SD on language learning outcomes. Although the recruitment tests screened candidates with higher cognitive skills, the classroom practice instrument used in the competitions appears to have helped identify the most effective teachers.

Keywords: teacher quality; Teacher recruitment policy; Educational policy; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I25 I28 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lma and nep-neu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... nce-from-Ecuador.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:14251

DOI: 10.18235/0013679

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().