Content Knowledge
Teaching - Practice Indicator
Essence
This indicator will measure the teachers’ mastery of the content that they currently teach or are supposed to teach.
Indicator
Percentage of 4th-grade teachers who have mastered the content knowledge covered in a 4th-grade curriculum. This determination is based on a global standard of minimum proficiency for 4th-grade teachers developed in consultation with outside experts. This indicator will be disaggregated by gender and urban/rural location.
Background
Teacher content knowledge is an important determinant of teaching quality. To be able to communicate and explain the curriculum, a teacher must have a good mastery of the material. When students in low- and middle-income countries are in classes led by teachers with higher content knowledge, they learn substantially more (Metzler & Woessmann 2012; Bietenbeck et al. 2017; Bold et al. 2018). But research shows that in many countries, teachers have not mastered the subject they are teaching (Bruns & Luque 2015; Tandon & Fukao 2015; World Bank 2016; Bold et al. 2017) and that their students learn little from attending school.
School Survey
Instrument Used for Measurement
Measurement Approach
This indicator is based on revised versions of teacher content-knowledge assessments developed for the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) Surveys, where the revisions reflect the findings of extensive psychometric analyses carried out by the dashboard team. These assessments are 30-minute exams taken by randomly selected teachers on either mathematics or language, depending on the subject they teach. To measure their subject content knowledge, teachers are asked to mark (or “grade”) mock student tests in language and in mathematics. This method of assessment, which has been widely used in recent surveys, has two advantages. First, it assesses teachers in a way that was consistent with their normal activities—namely, marking student work. Second, by not testing teachers in the same way as students are tested, it avoids directly challenging their professionalism.
Example:
Below is a test paper by a primary school student. Please mark the answers using a P for those answers that are correct and a × for those answers that are not correct. For those answers that you mark ×, you must write the correct answer in the space provided.
Complete the sentences with the correct words from the brackets
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a) Where (Does, Where, How long) does it take to walk to this school? |
(a) û |
|
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(b) û |
Instrument Sources
Based on the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) Instrument