Early childhood is a crucial period for the cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and language development of children. Of the 200 million children who do not reach their developmental potential worldwide, 66 percent live in South Asia. This paper explores gaps in knowledge among educators in...

This paper uses machine learning methods to identify key predictors of teacher effectiveness, proxied by student learning gains linked to a teacher over an academic year. Conditional inference forests and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator are applied to matched student-teacher...

Teachers, like all professionals, require ongoing professional development opportunities to improve their skills. This paper provides evidence on effective professional development characteristics and how at-scale programs incorporate those characteristics. The authors propose a standard set of...

Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly...

Skills and economic transformation in Africa -- Developing universal foundational skills in Sub-Saharan Africa -- Building skills for the school to work transition (technical, vocational education and training, tvet) -- Building skills for productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa through higher...