What’s at Play? Unpacking the Relationship between Teaching and Learning

Using unique nationally representative school and system survey data from 13 education systems in low and middle-income countries collected through the World Bank’s Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD), we examine how the pedagogical practices, including practices to foster student engagement and subject content knowledge of primary-school teachers, correlate with their students’ learning outcomes. The authors find that student performance on literacy (and, to a lesser extent, math) assessments are correlated with receiving instruction from teachers with better-measured pedagogical skills. While the better-pedagogy effect is modest for the entire sample, it is statistically robust and quite substantial for the upper-middle-income countries. Based on a sub-sample of those education systems, we also find that using learning strategies that support greater student engagement appears to be highly predictive of student learning outcomes in literacy. Better pedagogical practices correlate with teachers’ exposure to more practical, school-based pedagogical support, for example through induction or mentoring and feedback on lesson plans, and with better teacher evaluation at the school level. The findings confirm the important role of interventions providing direct pedagogical support and feedback to teachers through training, instructional leadership, and evaluation, and they highlight the potential for interventions to foster student engagement and improve learning outcomes.