What Teachers Believe : Mental Models about Accountability, Absenteeism, and Student Learning

Sabarwal, Shwetlena ; Abu-Jawdeh, Malek

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: EDUCATION;    TEACHER ABSENTEEISM;    TEACHER MOTIVATION;    TEACHER PERFORMANCE;    CORRUPTION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8454
RP-ID  :  WPS8454

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The time teachers spend teaching is lowin several developing countries. However, improving teachereffort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult toincrease teacher effort? One possibility is that teachersare resistant to increasing effort because they do notbelieve their effort is suboptimal. Such beliefs may bebased on their mental models on absenteeism, accountability,and student learning. This paper explores this idea usingdata from 16,000 teachers across eight developing countries,spanning five regions. It finds that, on average, teacherssupport test-based accountability and believe that they arein fact held accountable for student learning. In severalcountries, many teachers tend to normalize two types ofsuboptimal behaviors. These are (i) certain types ofabsenteeism, and (ii) paying extra attention towell-performing and well-resourced students. Finally, thepaper shows that ideas of accountability and absenteeism arestrongly framed by context in two direct ways. The first iswhether teachers favor exclusively reward-based forms ofaccountability. The second is the degree to which theysupport absenteeism linked to community tasks. These resultsprovide actionable insights on how changing teacher behaviorsustainably might require reshaping underlying mental models.