Following a tradition that relates household-level shocks to educational attainment, we examine the impact of teacher-level shocks on student learning. As a plausible measure for these shocks, we use teacher absenteeism during a 30-day recall period. Shocks that result in a 5percent increase in teacher absence rate reduced learning by 4 to 8 percent of average gains over the year, for both the ...

How does the literacy teacher negotiate the tensions between skills and social practice? Negotiation requires engaging with the debate in which literacy is seen as a set of discrete, transferable skills, dependent upon cognitive development, to the notion of literacies which are bound to social practice, and adapting teaching practices which align these two perspectives. Literacy teacher traini...

Using an innovative method, a Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT) was created to explore the implicit theories of intelligence among science and liberal arts teachers and their relationships with their gender. The results showed that for science teachers—especially for male teachers—there was a negative implicit association between “intelligence” and “modifiable” stimuli, whereas l...

The paper compares the treatment of fractions in a typical undergraduate college curriculum and in abstract algebra textbooks. It stresses that the main difference is that the undergraduate curriculum treats equivalent fractions as equal, and this treatment eventually leads to paradoxes and impairs the students’ ability to perceive ratios, proportions, radicals and rational exponents adequately...