Does Teachers’ Professional Background Matter for Students Learning? Evidence from Linear Mixed Effects Analysis of Secondary School Survey in India

• In Event: Teacher professionalization and its impact

Proposal

One of the distinguishing characteristics between private and public schools, among many others, in the Indian education system is the recruitment of teachers; the state schools have very rigid criteria on teacher qualifications and training. The private schools, on the other hand, encompass massive levels of heterogeneity with respect to teachers’ professional backgrounds. They are open to hiring teachers from diverse professional characteristics. In contexts of a few elite schools, they emphasise on the experience rather than on training & qualification, but in general, the private school sector in India is criticised for the lack of recruitment of trained or qualified teachers.

This debate or contrasting recruitment policies are not often substantially supported through examination of the underpinning assumptions, i.e. whether better qualified, trained and experienced teachers in a given context can effectively enhance student learning. Examining this would enable the policymakers to reshape the teacher recruitment policy and also to channelize the energy and resources in a direction that helps education systems by effectively contributing to better and equitable outcomes.

The assumptions or hypotheses of having better teachers and the better teachers being the ones who are better educated, or trained or experienced, and that they can significantly affect student learning are tested by a robust data source collected from 205 secondary schools in the states of Andhra Pradesh & Telangana, India by a survey conducted by Young Lives study, Oxford in 2016-17 (Moore, R., Azubuike, O. B., Reddy, P. P., Rolleston, C 2017). The survey, amidst many other variables, included a sample of 9820 students studying in grade 9 and their respective 281 maths teachers. The sample generated for the study involves the four major types of schools, through stratified sampling procedure, (public, private, private-aided & Tribal/Social welfare) in the chosen states. Among the various strata, the schools are chosen by random sampling technique making it a representative sample conducive to generalisations to the population of schools (of the four strata), at least for these two states of India.

This paper answers the following questions in order to infer the parameters of interest.

• What amount of variance in maths scores can be attributed to the difference in teachers who teach the students?

• Do teacher professional characteristics such as education level, training, experience in teaching significantly affect how students score, after controlling for the type of school (private or public), learning outside the school (private tuitions) and social background of the students?

• Do teacher characteristics affect the variance in caste and gender effects across various schools on their mathematics scores?

The above questions were satisfactorily answered using Linear mixed effects analysis of the secondary data set with pupil characteristics at level-1 and teachers (classrooms) at level-2. Findings suggest that a huge variance in maths scores, 46% approximately, can be attributed to the difference in the teachers who are responsible for teaching the subject. Investigating further into teacher characteristics by building suitable hierarchical linear models and controlling for appropriate variables, teacher professional background (which includes, training, qualifications and experience) is observed to have no significant effect on student mathematics scores. However, in addition to the above findings, teacher characteristics are found to have a significant positive role in dealing with the caste and gender effects across various classrooms and schools.

The possible inferences from this analysis can be twofold; firstly, and more importantly, schools would require the right kind of teachers, who are highly motivated and more passionate than more trained, qualified and experienced. Developing excellent teachers who can significantly improve student learning must go way beyond the vocabulary of qualifications, experience and training but cultivating the right spirit and force to bring an improvement in education quality. The qualifications needed to become a teacher, in terms of educational level, training attended, or the amount of experience neither resonates with the idea of teaching nor facilitate student learning.

The second plausible inference can be that the teacher training programs and institutional qualifications are not up to date with the latest developments in teaching and learning and do not calibrate well with the contemporary needs and changes, and they might not nurture the capacities required to be good teachers. This is also a strict reflection on the nature of higher education systems and training institutions that produce and equip teachers with the set of skills, motivation and capabilities.

In addition to demonstrating the evidence, this paper seeks to rekindle a more foundational discussion on what makes a good teacher? What aspects of a teacher play a role in student learning? It attempts to direct the discourse about teacher characteristics beyond the conventional terminology and to re-engage with the question of how do we identify a good teacher?

Authors

• Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara, University of Bath

• Kanika Rai Dhanda, Harvard University