Incentives and Teacher Effort : Further Evidence from a Developing Country
Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school. Yet, in the face of compelling evidence that many students are not learning what they are expected to learn, how to improve teacher performance ha...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/11/18490965/incentives-teacher-effort-further-evidence-developing-country-incentives-teacher-effort-further-evidence-developing-country http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16920 |
| Summary: | Few would contest that teachers are a
very important determinant of whether students learn in
school. Yet, in the face of compelling evidence that many
students are not learning what they are expected to learn,
how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of
much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This paper
examines how incentives, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary,
influence teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao
PDR, it estimates new measures of teacher effort, including
the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for
classes and teacher provision of private tutoring classes
outside class hours. The estimation results indicate that
teachers increase effort in response to non-pecuniary
incentives, such as greater teacher autonomy over teaching
materials, and monitoring mechanism, such as the existence
of an active parent-teacher association and the ability of
school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, the
paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous
ordinary least squares-probit model with school random
effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and
tutoring provision. |
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