Does Improving Teachers’ Skills Change Perceptions of Student Ability?

• In Event: Applying Behavioral Science to Improve Teacher Uptake of Pedagogical Best Practices for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in Sub-Saharan Africa and India

Proposal

Teachers’ perceptions of their students’ ability are shaped through academic assessment, gender, race, socio-economic status, and other background factors; these beliefs can have profound effects on student learning (Wolf and Brown 2023; Filmer et al., 2021). Poor perceptions remain a challenge in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). For example, in a study of 20,000 teachers across nine LMICs, Sabarwal et al. (2022) showed that over 40 percent of teachers believed there was little they could do to educate students of uneducated parents. A similar share of teachers felt that their teaching would have little effect if the students were not reaching grade-level expectations (Sabarwal et al. 2022). In Botswana, we found that less than half of teachers believed in the statement “every child in this school is capable of learning all basic operations.”

We conducted a study to explore the question of whether teacher beliefs are changeable. If teachers can improve their perceptions of their students’ potential and their own ability to teach, this could unlock a cycle of improved perceptions, better teaching quality, and improved learning. We focused on a program that significantly alters teacher behavior in the classroom – Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). We examined whether the experience of implementing TaRL affects teachers’ beliefs in their own teaching ability and their students’ potential.

We surveyed nearly 350 government teachers across 122 schools and six regions of Botswana before they participated in TaRL training and after they had implemented TaRL numeracy for several months. The pre-post findings we will present at CIES are not causal but provide a sense of how teachers’ beliefs might change as they learn to teach in a way that is a large departure from their business-as-usual classroom teaching.

Our key findings:
1. Diagnostic ability improved. Prior to receiving TaRL training, teachers overestimated their students’ mathematics ability by about 18 percentage points. After implementing TaRL, this figure shrunk by 20 percentage points for division and by 13 percentage points overall. Additionally, the share of teachers reporting that they were able to diagnose students’ challenges in learning basic mathematics operations grew by 15 percentage points after implementing TaRL.
2. Willingness to set lessons independently improved. Teachers also reported that after implementing TaRL they were less likely, by 13 percentage points, to follow a curriculum when their students couldn’t keep up with it. However, over half (60 percent) of teachers still said they would follow the curriculum even if their students were falling behind.
3. Teachers saw students learn and gained confidence in their teaching ability. After implementing TaRL, the share of teachers agreeing that all children in their school were capable of learning basic operations grew by 10 percentage points, albeit from a low baseline of 48 percent. Teachers also reported that they gained greater confidence in their teaching ability, with the share of teachers reporting that they could help even the lowest performing students learn mathematics growing also by approximately 10 percentage points.

Author

• Tendekai Nkwane, Youth Impact