Abstract
Teachers’ own level of human capital development is commonly believed to be deterministic for the quality and effectiveness of their instruction and management in the classroom. Yet, there still exists an international debate on whether better educated teachers contribute to students’ cognitive development. Leveraging a random class-assignment subsample (N = 3436) from a nationally representative teacher-student linked dataset in China, this study reassesses the ongoing contention regarding the value of teacher education. By linking differences in teachers’ own educational attainment levels across different subjects of instruction to variation in seventh grade students’ Chinese, Math and English test scores using student fixed-effect models, this study quantifies the cognitive returns attributable to better educated teachers, in student learning terms. Findings show that teachers with at least a bachelor’s degree contribute substantially to student learning compared to those who are less qualified, by as much as 0.069 SDs or about two additional months of learning over a typical academic year. Additional sensitivity analyses suggest that this observed effect is robust to model specifications, and is consistent for students from different backgrounds.
Highlights
Across the globe, there seems to be converging consensus that the quality of teachers holds central weight to making substantive progress in educational development
By employing student fixed-effect modelling, the empirical analysis related differences in teachers’ educational attainment levels across three subjects of instruction to the respective variation in student test scores, and findings confirmed that students benefited cognitively from having better educated teachers
This positive effect was evaluated as corresponding to 0.069 standard deviations per academic year, and was consistent for students from different backgrounds
Summary
There seems to be converging consensus that the quality of teachers holds central weight to making substantive progress in educational development. Rigorous research in the United States has indicated that students’ cognitive function can develop three times as much with a high-quality teacher as opposed to studying with a less effective teacher (Rockoff 2004). A national policy impetus has focused on modernizing the education system (Liu 2019), which included a movement to bachelorize teachers by mandating longer and higher-quality teacher preparation at the bachelor’s level To this end, holding a bachelor’s degree has played an increasingly important role in both licensure and job search in the Chinese teacher labor market (Zhu and Han 2006), and has led to the rapid rise of bachelor degree holders in the teaching force (Liu 2021c). Educational attainment across different subjects of instruction and related such differences to variation in student subject-test scores, while holding other relevant factors constant
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