Exploring Differential teacher effectiveness in Ethiopia and implications for Learning Equity

• In Event: Exploring Teacher Effectiveness, Technology Integration, and Equity Across Global Contexts

Proposal

Like many countries across the world Ethiopia faces the challenge of global learning crisis. Research on the Ethiopian context shows a negative evolution of learning outcomes despite the implementation of important reforms to improve both, equity and quality of elementary education system (Tiruneh et al., 2021; Iyer et al., 2020).
Among the different aspects shaping educational outcomes which literature has focused on, teachers’ role remains still a field to explore.
Indeed, research on teachers’ role has been mostly conducted through the value-added model (VAM) framework, which although being useful has the strong limitation of making teachers’ effectiveness a black box in which the specific teachers’ characteristics or pedagogical strategies affecting students’ learning outcomes remain unknown (Author et al, 2021).
This may arise important bias when determining the effectiveness of a teacher. For example, learning gains in a classroom might be the result of children their prior skills or the availability of academic resources in house. Under these circumstances, measuring teachers’ effectiveness with a simple VAM might lead to an overestimation or underestimation of its actual value.
Teachers’ contribution can also vary depending on school characteristics such as the educational curriculum. Kaffenberger & Lant (2020) have illustrated this with the concept of Potential Pedagogical Function (PPF). The general idea of PPF is that what is taught (the curriculum) may not be adequate to actual students’ skills. If this mismatch happens, given that teachers must teach this curriculum, there would always be a group of students with no gains either because they are way behind the minimum skills to learn anything of the curriculum, or because they are way above the maximum skills that are taught. Thus, teachers’ effectiveness would depend less on their domain of the topic and more on their capacity to adapt into classroom to address and mitigate the gap between students’ skills and curriculum expectations (Author, 2024).
Research also shows that learning gains can also vary depending on students’ affinity with teachers in terms of gender or cultural background (Dee, 2005). A greater affinity between teacher and students can improve the quality of interactions in classroom which would eventually lead to greater learning gains.
If learning gains depends on different children and school conditions, teachers’ effectiveness should be assessed accounting for these characteristics. In this paper we deal with this issue by exploring differential teachers’ effectiveness in math outcomes for the Ethiopian context.
Our empirical research aims to answer to the following questions: 1. Does teacher effectiveness appear to play a role in explaining the progress of groups of pupils with different characteristics? 2. Do teachers of different levels of ‘overall effectiveness’ tend to achieve this effectiveness by raising learning outcomes of particular groups of pupils?
We use rich data collected by RISE Ethiopia in 2019 to answer both questions.
We start by conducting a differential value-added model to estimate students’ learning gains for different groups of students. We use baseline math scores to divide students in quintiles according to their level of math at the start of the year. We also use the wealth index variable to classify students by their wealth level. Finally, we classify students in terms of their affinity with their teacher. For this we use the gender and cultural background variables, and we define gender affinity when students and teachers share the same gender, and cultural affinity when students and teachers share the same cultural background.
Then, we rank teachers from most to least effective ones using their overall effectiveness estimate and plot how each teacher’s overall value-added is shared across the different group of students. The expectation is that the means of the least effective teachers will show ‘negative’ value added, interpreted relative to their peers, not to any other expectation.
We find that teacher effectiveness varies depending on the classroom composition with highly effective teachers increasing learning outcomes for all students, specially those who have the lowest prior attainment, and less effective teachers only increasing outcomes for students with the lowest prior attainment, while learning gains for best students is negative. Besides, highly effective teachers increase learning outcomes of all students, regardless of their wealth level, while low effective teachers produce a null increase of less wealthy students and a negative increase of most wealthy ones. No differential value added is found by gender or cultural affinity.
Our findings provide important evidence to support the way how we understand teachers’ effectiveness moving from a framework based simple value added to a framework based on the analysis of teachers’ pedagogical adequateness and adaptiveness.

Authors

• Moses Oketch, University College London Ucl

• Caine Rolleston, UCL Insitute of Education

• Cesar Burga, UCL