Africa's Skill Tragedy: Does Teachers' Lack of Knowledge Lead to Low Student Performance?

Marc Piopiunik (), Jan Bietenbeck and Simon Wiederhold ()

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Student performance in Sub-Saharan Africa is tragically low. We study the importance of teacher subject knowledge for student performance in this region using unique international assessment data for sixth-grade students and their teachers. To circumvent bias due to unobserved student heterogeneity, we exploit variation within students across math and reading. We find that teacher subject knowledge has a modest impact on student performance on average. However, this effect is substantially larger for students with access to textbooks, which indicates important complementarities between teacher knowledge and school resources. Results are robust to adding teacher fixed effects and not driven by sorting.

JEL-codes: I21 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Africa’s Skill Tragedy: Does Teachers’ Lack of Knowledge Lead to Low Student Performance? (2018)
Working Paper: Africa's Skill Tragedy: Does Teachers' Lack of Knowledge Lead to Low Student Performance? (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145562

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