Inadequate Teacher Content Knowledge and What to Do About It: Evidence from El Salvador

Aymo Brunetti (), Konstantin Büchel (), Martina Jakob (), Ben Jann and Daniel Steffen ()

No 41, University of Bern Social Sciences Working Papers from University of Bern, Department of Social Sciences

Abstract: Good teachers are the backbone of a successful education system. Yet, in developing countries, teachers’ content knowledge is often inadequate. This study documents that primary school math teachers in the department of Morazan in El Salvador only master 47 percent of the curriculum they teach. In a randomized controlled trial with 175 teachers, we further evaluate a computer-assisted learning (CAL) approach to address this shortcoming. After a five months in-service training combining CAL-based self-studying with monthly workshops, participating teachers outperformed their peers from the control group by 0.29 standard deviations, but this effect depreciated by 72 percent within one year. Our simulations show that the program is unlikely to be as cost-effective as CAL interventions directly targeting students.

Keywords: education quality; teacher performance; teacher training; student learning; basic math education; computer-assisted learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I20 I21 I28 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2021-12-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-knm and nep-ure
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https://boris.unibe.ch/162243/1/Brunetti-etal-2021-CATT.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Inadequate Teacher Content Knowledge and What to Do About It: Evidence from El Salvador (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bss:wpaper:41

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