Teacher Literacy and Numeracy Skills: International Evidence from PIAAC and ALL

De Economist, Sep 2016

Using the OECD-studies PIAAC and ALL, this paper shows that teachers on average have better literacy and numeracy skills than other respondents in almost all of the 15 countries in the samples. In most countries, teachers outperform others in the bottom percentiles, while in some countries they perform better than others throughout the skill distribution. These results imply that the scope to improve teachers’ skills varies between countries and that policy makers should take the shape of the skills distribution into account when designing interventions in order to most efficiently raise teachers’ skills.

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Teacher Literacy and Numeracy Skills: International Evidence from PIAAC and ALL

Teacher Literacy and Numeracy Skills: International Evidence from PIAAC and ALL Bart H. H. Golsteyn 0 1 Stan Vermeulen 0 1 Inge de Wolf 0 1 JEL Classification I 0 1 0 Inspectorate of Education and Department of Economics, Maastricht University , P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht , The Netherlands 1 Department of Economics, Maastricht University , P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht , The Netherlands Using the OECD-studies PIAAC and ALL, this paper shows that teachers on average have better literacy and numeracy skills than other respondents in almost all of the 15 countries in the samples. In most countries, teachers outperform others in the bottom percentiles, while in some countries they perform better than others throughout the skill distribution. These results imply that the scope to improve teachers' skills varies between countries and that policy makers should take the shape of the skills distribution into account when designing interventions in order to most efficiently raise teachers' skills. Teachers; Skills; Human capital 1 Introduction Teachers are essential for the development of human capital in society. Their skills are formed in teacher training programs, but are also highly influenced by the type and overall quality of the students who enter these programs and become teachers. Understanding which segment of the population is part of the teacher corps is important in order to determine the focus of interventions which can improve the quality of teachers. This paper compares the dispersions of literacy and numeracy skills of primary and secondary school teachers relative to those of other respondents. We use international data of 15 different countries from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALL), both conducted by the OECD. These data sets are representative samples of the adult population in various countries. They include reading and math test scores, and contain detailed information about occupations. For each country, we compare average math and literacy skills between teachers and other respondents, and we investigate differences at the 10th and 90th percentiles of the distributions. In virtually all countries, both primary and secondary school teachers score on average higher on literacy and numeracy tests than the country average. Secondary school teachers score higher than primary school teachers on both skill measures. Our analyses of the differences in skill distributions between teachers and others show that the lowest scoring teachers significantly outperform the lowest scoring other respondents both on literacy and numeracy tests. At the top of the distributions, we find that the best secondary school teachers are not strongly outperformed by the best other respondents, and that the best primary school teachers score only slightly lower than the best other respondents. The extent to which low scoring teachers outperform other low scoring respondents differs substantially across countries. For instance, in the Netherlands, primary school teachers at the 10th percentile perform much better than other respondents at the 10th percentile, while in Denmark, primary school teachers at the 10th percentile do not outperform other respondents at the 10th percentile that strongly. In Denmark, it might therefore be an effective policy to focus on the bottom of the distribution (e.g., by raising barriers to enter into teaching, or focusing training on the worst teachers), while in the Netherlands little can be gained in becoming more restrictive at the lower end. The main message of the paper is that it is important to investigate the shape of the relative skill distributions in addition to the differences in average skills when designing policy to improve the teacher corps. Our results persist when restricting the comparison to the tertiary educated subsample. The results are not driven by age or gender, and are not sensitive to the inclusion of measures for the frequency of skill use. This paper contributes to the literature on teacher characteristics and teacher quality. Teacher quality has been recognized as one of the most important determinants of educational productivity (Hanushek 2011; Barber and Mourshed 2007) . Hanushek (1992) finds that being taught by a high quality teacher results on average in 1.5 years’ worth of progress in one academic year, while being taught by a low quality teacher results on average in 0.5 years’ worth of progress. Although the exact characteristics of teacher quality are not well-defined (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006) , teachers’ skills as measured by scores on achievement tests have been found to be associated with educational productivity (Metzler and Woessmann 2012; Eide et al. 2004) . Hanushek et al. (2014) furthermore show that teachers’ cognitive skills are an important factor in explaining international differences in student performance. While such (...truncated)


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Bart H. H. Golsteyn, Stan Vermeulen, Inge de Wolf. Teacher Literacy and Numeracy Skills: International Evidence from PIAAC and ALL, De Economist, 2016, pp. 365-389, Volume 164, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s10645-016-9284-1