Unpacking the Black Box of School Quality

This paper studies the impact of classroom environment on primary students’ skills. We focus on features of the classroom environment which have been posited as key for student learning but on which robust empirical evidence remains sparse due to the challenges outlined above. Furthermore, we study how these features of the classroom environment affect several key areas of student development - not only academic skills, but also higher order cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills. We build on our companion paper which shows that the effect of being in a higher versus a lower quality classroom in Vietnam on student learning is comparable to those found in studies of other contexts, including the US and Ecuador (Carneiro et al., 2022). Now we focus on the question of what are the key ingredients of high quality classrooms in this context.