Hein, C; (2015) Essays on the effectiveness and production of teacher inputs. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis conducts cross-country analyses using data from all inhabited continents to examine the support of common expectations based on either Neo-classical Economics or popular beliefs. The first two chapters use SACMEQ data from sub-Saharan Africa. The first chapter argues that changes in class size trigger a number of mechanisms affecting how the pupils’ household, school leaders, teachers and peers behave. These behaviours are highly context-specific and may counterbalance or exacerbate one another. It finds that the main threat to a pupil’s achievement is sharing the teacher with more peers, but that household behaviours can mitigate or even outweigh this threat. The second chapter examines the conditional correlation of observable teacher characteristics and pupil achievement. It argues and demonstrates that previous research using the same data does not sufficiently address the teacher-pupil matching problem and that lacking to do so leads to very different conclusions. The chapter categorises the available observable teacher characteristics as proxies for either subject-matter or pedagogic competency and examines their complementarity by adding interactions between the individual proxies of these two competencies. The evidence suggests these two competencies are substitutes in six of ten countries. The third chapter uses OECD TALIS 2013 data to explore the connection between teachers’ workload and their job satisfaction. It applies a production function approach that combines both Top-down and Bottom-up approaches. It finds that the effect of teachers’ workload measured in hours is negligible. But evidence of the effect of teachers’ perceptions of their workplace from the English sub-sample provides clear evidence that the workplace matters.

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