Does evaluation change teacher effort and performance? Quasi-experimental evidence from a policy of retesting students
Esteban M. Aucejo, Teresa Romano and Eric S. Taylor
We document measurable, lasting gains in student achievement caused by a change in teachers' evaluation incentives. A short-lived rule created a discontinuity in teachers' incentives when allocating effort across their assigned students: students who failed an initial end-of-year test were retested a few weeks later, and then only the higher of the two scores was used when calculating the teacher's evaluation score. One year later, long after the discontinuity in incentives had ended, retested students scored 0.03 higher than nonretested students. Otherwise identical students were treated differently by teachers because of evaluation incentives, despite arguably equal returns to teacher effort.
9 May 2022
Review of Economics and Statistics 104(3) , pp.417-430, 2022
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/104/3/417/97737/Does-Evaluation-Change-Teacher-Effort-and
This Journal article is published under the centre's Education programme.