Improving the quality of education in developing countries: An experimental evaluation of teacher training programs in El Salvador

Quality education is one of the Sustainable Development Goals advocated by the United Nations, but many developing countries are still far from reaching this target. In the last decades, low- and middle-income countries have made impressive progress in raising school enrollment. Yet, their productivity in converting educational investments into human capital remains low, as international student assessments highlight. In response to these findings, the World Bank dedicated its World Development Report 2018 to what was declared a global “learning crisis”. Recent data from Africa, Asia, and Latin America shows that poorly qualified teachers – both in terms of pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge – are a key barrier to more effective schooling systems. The available evidence even suggests that the learning crisis in developing countries is, to a large degree, a direct consequence of a teaching crisis. Without joint efforts, this situation is likely to reproduce itself: Many of today’s poorly qualified teachers will continue teaching for years to come and consequently shape tomorrow’s teachers. Despite a growing consensus that inadequate teaching quality lies at the heart of the learning crisis, potential solutions to address the issue have remained understudied.
Teacher training programs may be a promising strategy to cut through the outlined vicious cycle that plagues many schooling systems. The main goal of our project is to assess the potential of such programs to raise student learning outcomes in a context that is characterized by a twin deficit among teachers: a lack of both pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. We further aim to analyze how gains in teachers’ competencies are passed on to students, and how training programs should be designed to optimize their effectiveness. We are particularly interested in quantifying the relative efficacy of pedagogical and content-related training elements, and whether combining them unfolds relevant complementarities.
To study these questions, we collaborate with educational experts from the University of Teacher Education Zug (PH Zug) and Consciente, an NGO specialized in evidence-based schooling projects. Our team of economists, sociologists, and educational scientists has designed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to be rolled out across 300 primary schools in El Salvador. Its core features three teacher training programs focusing on either (i) pedagogical knowledge, (ii) content knowledge, or (iii) a combination of both inputs, referred to as pedagogical content knowledge. During one school year, 225 primary school math teachers will participate in one of these training programs that are planned to share a common basic framework combining face-to-face meetings, coaching elements, and self-study modules. To quantify the impact of the interventions, we plan to collect comprehensive data on teacher competence (i.e. content knowledge & teaching practices) as well as student learning outcomes in math across two consecutive school years.
This project will shed light on possible answers to the important but largely understudied question of how to advance educational quality in a schooling system staffed with poorly qualified teachers. We plan to utilize our insights to advise policymakers and to raise awareness about the value of impact evaluations to strengthen accountability and institutional learning in the development cooperation community.