Calendrier du 31 janvier 2017
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 31/01/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle 8, RDC Bâtiment G, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
BRIOLE Simon (Paris School of Economics)
From teacher quality to teaching quality: Instruction time, teaching practices and student achievement in the US
Though teachers are consistently found to play a major role in shaping student learning, the determinants of instructional productivity remains a puzzle. In this paper, I implement a within-student between (math) topics strategy on TIMSS 2011 US student test scores to assess the average mathematics instructional productivity in the US. Then, I investigate the role of a largely unexplored and yet intuitive input of teachers’ productivity, namely the teaching prac- tices they implement in the classroom. I find that, on average, one weekly hour of mathematics instructional time increases test scores by 4.4% of a standard deviation, and that the use of practices emphasizing student active participation in the lesson is positively and strongly corre- lated to instructional productivity. A one standard deviation increase in the relative use of these practices is related to a 0.08 standard deviation increase in student test scores over the year, which is equivalent to half the effect of a standard deviation increase in teacher value-added estimates from previous studies. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that teachers implementing these kind of practices are also better at improving student non cognitive skills related to math learning, and that they are particularly efficient with female students.