Reflection on Isaac Mbiti’s presentation

Trade and Development Seminar

Title of the presentation: “Results from two (related) papers that examine the effect of teacher
incentives on students learning outcomes in Tanzania”

Trade and Development Seminars are carried out towards the goals of expanding and
sharing ideas to improve people’s lives through policy analysis and unraveling problems that
obstruct countries development path. In this opportunity, the seminar was given by Isaac Mbiti,
an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, he had the chance to talk about his research
project that was in the area of education. In this particular area, Isaac could carry out a project
concerning incentivizing schools and teachers to answer the question whether these incentives
are really strong enough as to produce better results in student’s grade performance (it was not
clear if it was on learning too).

As a matter of fact, I enjoy these seminars as I come from a developing country then the
ideas of the research and the problems they are facing is clearer to me, because of experience.
Now, talking about the seminar, there were many points I can extract and have a comment on
them. First, I want to talk about the positive aspects I found in this research and then, the
negative aspects or gaps I think I could spot.

Context of the research project: Isaac and his team went to Tanzania and picked some
schools to carry out the project, in these schools he divided in to different groups as to perform
the project. Some of the schools would receive an incentive to the schools as grants (they could
use the grants for anything practically), and some other receive the incentives through their
teachers in the day of the exam (after knowing the results, if I am 100 percent sure). Though,
there were two last groups the control schools and the school that would receive the grants
and the teacher incentives. The final results were that some positive results could be perceived
from the different incentives given separately, but the maximum results and very significant
would turn out of the mixed methods (teacher incentives and grants)

Additionally, the results were displayed to all of the participants and, there were some
concerns I could perceive from the research as well as some positive points I could retrieve
from the seminar that are to be exposed in the following paragraphs.

Positive aspects, Isaac did a good description of what the context of the research was,
all the problems of conducting the research and the methodology he used for this project. It
was clear to me what was going on with the research, in this sense. The ideas of giving
incentives to the schools and to the students did get to some positive results as shown during
the presentation. But these results were only with the combined method meaning, incentivizing
teachers as well as schools at the same time, otherwise the results were not significant in an
overall sense.
 It could be said too, that incentivizing schools and teachers do give a positive result on
average on the students’ performance in test. But this result does pay the most attention to the
left behind students, and does not account for their socio-economic backgrounds. This topic
will be developed with more details below.

Furthermore, I will not be able to talk much on the specific econometrics and other
specific statistical tools he developed during the seminar because I am not yet acquainted with
those tools.

Negative aspects, in this part I will talk about the points I considered were the most
important points he could not addressed in his research project and that are the most inflective
points when talking about development. First, he did this randomized group draws and
separate them in two groups the treatment and the control. But in advance the teacher new
they would do this randomized selection. So, a biased might have occurred in this period, when
they are let known of this fact and the time when they make the selection. Second, Isaac
showed that the results were beneficial in general, but we did not know about the performance
of the poorest kids in the research, they did not have well defined test for these kids. This
should have been the main point of their research.

Poor people are the ones we want to attack with good policies that can motivate these
people to go back to a better life and for their future generations. Thus, I do not care about
improving grades in general when I do not know how the left behind did in relation to the other
people.

Moreover, Isaac could not mention if the improvement in grades was correlated with a
improvement in learning. This is the optimum outcome in giving incentives in educations. It has
been proved that grades do not spill over in learning if the evaluation process does not involved
this learning process. Therefore, it was not clear for me if the test they conducted to the kids
took into account this fact.

Finally, the research did not tell what was the average quality of the teachers in these
areas. In a defense, I would say this is more complicated and should take more work. Anyways,
it is an important point in the connection of events within the research.

Afterwards, I benefitted from the seminar I learned a lot from Isaac and his area of
interest, I personally believe that attending to these seminars make us aware of what to do and
what to avoid when starting a research project.