From Teacher Quality to Teaching Quality: Instructional Productivity and Teaching Practices in the US

Though teachers are consistently found to play a major role in determining student achievement, little is known about what teachers can do to increase their instructional productivity. This paper develops a new empirical strategy, based on within-student within math variations in student test scores, to assess the instructional hourly productivity of math teachers in the US. Building on these estimates, we show that teachers' hourly productivity strongly relates to the use of teaching practices emphasizing student active participation in the lesson (modern practices). One weekly hour of math instructional time increases student test scores by 4.4% of a standard deviation on average, but one hour spent with a teacher above the modern practices index median is more than twice as productive as one hour spent with a teacher under this median (+5.9% vs +2.7% standard deviations). A further investigation suggests that the positive effects associated to modern practices are partially mediated by an improvement in student self-confidence and motivation to learn mathematics.