Teacher value-added and gender gaps in educational outcomes

Andres Barrios-Fernandez and Marc Riudavets-Barcons

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to estimate teacher value added (TVA) on test scores and on an educational attainment index. We allow each teacher to have a different TVA for male and female students and show that differences in TVA explain an important part of the gender gaps we observe in test scores and postsecondary education trajectories. The gaps in gender-specific teaching effectiveness are especially pronounced in mathematics. Indeed, eliminating within-teacher differences in math test score VA would reduce the gender gap in math performance by 67%. We explore what could be behind these gaps in gender-specific TVA and find no significant differences in what makes teachers effective for male and female students. We do find, however, significant associations between teacher characteristics-e.g., gender and performance in the college admission exam-and practices-e.g., paying attention to low-performing students, congratulating students who improve, and having a good relationship with students-with teacher effectiveness. Finally, we also show that math teachers tend to be biased in favor of male students and that teachers with smaller gender biases are more effective for both, male and female students.

Keywords: teacher value-added; education gender gaps; teaching practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2024-04-29
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126811/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:126811

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().