Closing Gaps: The Medium-term Impacts of Teaching Quality in Primary School

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The general objective of this Technical Cooperation (TC) is to continue the groundbreaking work of Closing Gaps. "Closing Gaps" is a longitudinal study in Ecuador collecting first-of-its-kind information on the relationship between teaching quality and children's learning in public elementary schools, and use the results to directly inform educational policy reform in the region. To this end, Closing Gaps has spent the past four years meticulously gathering and analyzing randomized control data from a cohort of Ecuadorian teachers and their students from the coastal region of the country, to identify the specific teacher characteristics and practices that allow young, disadvantaged children, who enter school with profound deficits in their cognitive development, to close their skills gaps and catch up to their peers as they advance through primary school.To this end, the TC has two specific objectives: (i) to generate evidence on learning outcomes from the cohort of students and teachers in the study during their 4th grade of elementary school, and (ii) to compare and analyze the results that have already been obtained from the project to determine whether the effects found of the impact of teacher quality on student learning are persistent over time and how they interact. These objectives will allow us to assess: (i) whether short-term teacher effects on children's learning and development observed after each year of schooling are maintained over time; (ii) how having a better teacher in one grade affects having a better teacher in the following grade;[1] (iii) whether teacher effects are stable from one year to another (Does teaching quality vary from year to year? Is a "good" teacher "good" across different school years? Is a teacher "good" with different groups of students?); and (iv) potential pilots of professional development interventions to increase teacher quality. This work will provide the foundation upon which policy makers in the region can build strong teacher policies to improve the delivery of high quality education.