Does the performance of elementary school students improve when teachers have higher education?

Responsible researcher: Adriano Valladão Pires Ribeiro

Article title: EFFECT OF TEACHER TRAINING ON PROFICIENCY AT THE BEGINNING OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Authors of the article: Geraldo Andrade da Silva Filho

Location of intervention: Brazil

Sample size: 71,758 classrooms (around 320 thousand students for each subject)

Big theme: Education

Type of Intervention: Training/Teacher Training

Variable of Main Interest: Gains in proficiency in Portuguese and Mathematics

Evaluation method: Experimental Evaluation (RCT)

Policy Problem

A student's academic and professional success is associated with the quality of the teachers who taught them. The factors that determine teaching quality may be related to observable characteristics, such as experience and education, and unobservable ones, such as interpersonal skills and class management. INEP researcher, Geraldo da Silva Filho, contributes to this discussion by measuring the impact of higher education for fourth and fifth year elementary school teachers in public schools on the proficiency of their students.

Assessment Context

Elementary school teachers can be qualified in three ways according to their training, they can have higher education compatible with the area they teach, other higher education or no higher education. The National Education Plan 2014-2024 provides for a national teacher training policy, ensuring that all basic education teachers have specific higher education in their area of ​​activity, that is, that all teachers have degree training in the specific area or in Pedagogy. This led federal, state and municipal governments to launch stimulus programs in order to comply with public policy guidelines. Therefore, measuring the impact of teachers' higher education on students' proficiency becomes even more relevant.

Intervention Details

To study the issue, a combination of several INEP databases was used. The sample comprises all students enrolled in public education networks who took the 2015 Prova Brasil (PB) and the 2013 National Literacy Assessment (ANA). Furthermore, students who had more than one teacher, whether in the fourth year in 2014 or in the fifth year in 2015, so that the student's result could be attributed to the teacher's training. Finally, for each student in this description, he was associated with the higher education education of his Portuguese Language and Mathematics teacher. Teacher information was obtained from the Basic Education School Census (CEB) of 2014 and 2015, respectively for the fourth and fifth year.

The Prova Brasil is carried out by students in the fifth and ninth years of elementary school and seeks to evaluate students on Portuguese language and mathematics issues. Along with the test, there is also a socioeconomic questionnaire so that the context can be associated with the student's performance. The National Literacy Assessment tests, in 2013, were administered to students in the third year of elementary school. Half of the students in each class took the Reading exam and the other half in Mathematics, in which the distribution for each test was done through a random draw.

Methodology Details

The effect of teacher training on the proficiency of their students in the subjects of Mathematics and Portuguese Language was captured by joint learning throughout the 4th and 5th years of elementary school based on the grades obtained in the 2015 PB applied to fifth year students. In other words, the aim is to estimate the value added by teachers who have higher education in student learning. However, there are difficulties in carrying out such measurement. The main problem is isolating the effect of teacher training itself from other factors, that is, confusing what is caused by teacher training with other reasons such as the characteristics of the students, the school and even other characteristics of the teacher. (experience, postgraduate degree, etc.).

In particular, two factors deserve to be discussed. First, the student's learning process is cumulative and built over the years, the performances obtained in the fourth and fifth years should be conditioned on their entire school, family history and individual skills. In practice, however, it is not possible to observe all of these factors, so the ANA grade applied in the third year is used and it is assumed that it is enough to aggregate all of the student's previous information up to that point. Second, the assignment of teachers to students may be non-random, that is, the allocation of teachers could occur according to their skills and compromise the measurement of the effect of teacher training on student performance. The SAEB Director's Questionnaire allows you to resolve this limitation by providing information on the criteria used when forming a class and designating its teacher.

With information about students' grades in PB 2015 and ANA 2013 when they were, respectively, in the fifth and third year, their socioeconomic characteristics, the characteristics of the class and school where they studied and the training of their teachers, it is possible capture the effect of the teacher's higher education course on student progress between the two assessments. This exercise is carried out separately for the subjects of Mathematics and Portuguese Language, the two contents assessed in the ANA and PB, investigating, at first, only the effects of higher education and, then, the effects of specific higher education.

Results

The first investigation, whether any higher education affects school proficiency in Mathematics and Portuguese Language of public school students, concluded that there are no significant effects, that is, students who had teachers with higher education in the fourth and/or fifth year performed better similar to those who had classes with teachers without a higher education degree. This result considers the average among all teachers with a higher education degree, the following exercise disaggregates the higher education course between specific training in Mathematics or Portuguese Language, training in Pedagogy and training in another higher education course.

Students who studied Mathematics with teachers trained in this area had a higher average performance of 4 points on the SAEB scale in the Prova Brasil when compared to students who had classes with teachers without higher education. The second greatest positive effect occurs for those who had at least one of the two years of study with a teacher trained in mathematics. For the analogous case of the Portuguese language, the same cannot be verified, with proficiency gains null for all training courses. In other words, the disaggregation captured an effect of gains in student performance only when the specific training is Mathematics.

Public Policy Lessons

There is a cost in encouraging and training elementary school teachers to receive higher education according to the guidelines of the National Education Plan. Higher education, however, does not guarantee that teaching is better, as quality is also involved with factors such as knowledge of the content taught, the pedagogical practices adopted and classroom management. In the case of the study presented, only students with teachers trained in Mathematics managed to improve their performance in the Prova Brasil mathematics test.

Reference

Silva Filho, Geraldo Andrade da. "Effect of Teacher Training on Proficiency at the Beginning of Elementary School." Brazilian Journal of Economics, v. 73, no. 3, p. 385-411, 2019.