Pedagogical Skills

Teaching - Practice Indicator

Essence

This indicator will measure the teachers’ mastery of the pedagogical skills needed to properly teach the content.

Indicator

Percentage of 4th-grade teachers who reach a certain level of proficiency in pedagogical skills. This indicator is disaggregated by teacher gender and urban/rural location.

Background

Good teaching skills are not just about subject content knowledge. They also require that teachers know how to translate their content knowledge into effective pedagogy in the classroom. Teachers must also know how to assess student capabilities and react appropriately, for example by asking questions that require various types of responses and by giving feedback on those responses, commonly referred to as “knowledge of the context of learning” (Johnson 2006; Danielsson 2007, Pianta et al. 2007, Coe, Aloisi, Higgins and Major 2014; Ko & Sammons 2013, Vieluf et al. 2012). While factors like curriculum and teacher qualifications explain a small fraction of the variation in student learning (Burchinal, Howes, and Kontos 2002), the quality of teacher-child interactions has been shown to explain a much larger share of student learning (Dobbie & Fryer 2013; Hamre 2014; Muijs et al. 2014).

School Survey

Instrument Used for Measurement

  • Survey of Public Officials
  • Existing Data Source
  • Policy Survey
  • School Survey

Measurement Approach

To measure teachers’ pedagogical skills, the GEPD uses Teach, a World Bank-developed classroom observation tool. This is a new instrument designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries (Molina et al. 2018). The tool captures (i) the time teachers spend teaching and the extent to which students are on task, and (ii) the quality of teaching practices that help develop students’ socioemotional and cognitive skills. More specifically, it measures 1) Time on Task, 2) Classroom Culture (supportive learning environment, positive behavioral expectations), 3) Instruction (lesson facilitation, checks for understanding, feedback, critical thinking), and 4) Socioemotional skills (autonomy, perseverance, and social & collaborative skills). A randomly selected 4th-grade class is recorded during the school visit, and the video is then scored using the Teach tool. An example of how the tool scores the behaviors that comprises the score for each teacher is below.

 

Score

1

2

3

4

5

 

LOW

MEDIUM

HIGH

The teacher provides specific comments or prompts that help clarify students’ misunderstandings

Teacher either doesn’t provide students with comments about their misunderstanding OR the comments provided are simple/evaluative

The teacher provides students with general or superficial comments/prompts about their misunderstandings.

Teacher provides students with specific comments that contain substantive information that helps clarify students’ misunderstandings

Instrument Sources

Teach (Learn more at http://saber.worldbank.org/index.cfm?indx=5&sub=7)