Teacher-training to transform classrooms, teachers and communities

Nourani Vesall, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and supported by SBE's Economics program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Abhijit Banerjee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying the ways in which a novel pedagogical approach can influence teacher ability and effort and student learning outcomes. Ensuring quality teaching is a challenge around the world, so it is natural to ask: how can teacher quality and effort be improved? Attempts to answer this question by using material incentives (e.g., increased salaries or increased pay for performance outcomes) have not produced definitive answers. The fellow and sponsoring scientist have partnered with an NGO that implements a novel teacher training to gain insights into the multifaceted challenge of increasing teacher motivation and ability. The teacher training instils in teachers a love of learning by deepening their appreciation and understanding of the scientific method. By gaining the ability to practice methods of scientific inquiry, teachers begin to see both themselves and their students as scientists with the responsibility of building on accumulated knowledge to provide benefits to local communities. They thus become researchers with a social mission to apply and generate learned and, respectively, new knowledge to improve student and community outcomes. A core hypothesis of the study is that teachers' love of learning is transferred to students through a new orientation towards knowledge and its potential uses. The proposed research employs a randomized control trial design to establish causal linkages between the teacher training and relevant outcomes. Fifty schools out of 100 are randomly selected to send teachers to participate in the teacher training. The study will compare outcomes in treatment and control schools to test hypotheses using originally collected datasets that include information on teacher attitudes, student learning and community outcomes. The study will be among the first to advance understanding about sources of intrinsic motivations in teachers and how they can be tapped to create qualitative and quantitative improvements to teacher quality and student learning. This is a significant contribution - studies examining links between teacher effort and monetary incentives often lead to outcomes that do not correlate with student learning. Additionally, the study will explore whether the pedagogical approach from the training leads teachers, and subsequently students, to apply knowledge to influence local community processes. Such an experience may lead to more creative economic activity, deeper engagement in civic processes. Thus, a second contribution of the study is that it demonstrates the ways in which different pedagogical approaches generate local and immediate returns to education in addition to delayed returns stemming from human capital investments the leads to workforce participation later in life. A second goal of the fellowship is to examine how nation-wide teacher training and recruitment strategies can tap into such sources of motivation to influence teacher quality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.