Teacher development

We study Zambia’s government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. A randomized trial estimates its effects on literacy and numeracy, on the transfer of targeted skills to adjacent domains, and on later exam performance. Alongside it, 78 in-depth interviews with education personnel combine thematic coding with unsupervised machine learning to explore what drives teachers to change their instructional practices.

There is substantial emphasis on improving classroom practices, primarily through activity-based instruction, to increase the …