_Social Desirability and Survey Design bias:_ One concern is that survey questions are prone to ‘social‐ desirability biases’ and might be sensitive to overall questionnaire design. Evidence suggests that this type of response bias is common wherein survey respondents answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others (Fisher 1993; Zerbe and Paulhus 1987). To some extent, this is unavoidable in any exercise that tries to directly elicit respondent beliefs. In these cases, the common practice is to interpret responses as lower bounds when a positive response is socially undesirable and as upper bounds when a positive response is socially desirable.

To provide an estimate of the extent of potential biases, data collection in Zanzibar included a survey experiment within which one group of teachers were asked direct questions about personal beliefs while the other was asked the same question indirectly (beliefs of teachers in general). Results are summarized in Annex 1. In line with theory, there is statistically significant social desirability bias in 14 out of 25 questions (56 percent of questions). However, the extent of the bias ranges between 4 and 25 percentage points, always aligned with the expected direction of social desirability. This suggests that the survey provides potential lower‐bounds of non‐pro‐social mental models.

As mentioned in the introduction, this paper is designed to offer preliminary proof‐of‐concept validation for the importance of studying mental models to better understand/influence teacher effort. It does not offer any causal insights and does not explore identified mental models in any detail.

A standard caveat in studies based on teacher surveys is that they cover only those teachers who were present on the day of the survey. To the extent that absent teachers are likely to be systematically different in terms of their beliefs, the results are biased in terms of its representativeness of the ‘average’ teacher. This study only captures results for the ‘average teacher who was present at the time of the survey’.

# 5. Conclusions

Low teacher effort is a central issue in education service delivery for many low‐ and middle‐income countries. However, it has been somewhat unresponsive to policy and programmatic interventions. One possible reason why teachers do not increase effort might be because they do not think they can or they should. If they find their current levels of effort to be socially optimal and contextually justified, then they are less likely to increase effort in response to changes in accountability and incentive structures.

This idea has not received much attention in empirical work so far. In this paper, we try to address this gap showing how the concept of ‘mental models’ may be relevant to this discussion. Using data from 16,000 teachers across 8 low‐ and middle‐income countries, we show how teachers approach issues of absenteeism, accountability, and ownership. We uncover three key insights. First, teachers feel that absence is acceptable under certain situations. Second, teachers feel they are already assessed based on student learning. Third, better‐performing and better‐resourced students are seen as more deserving of teacher attention. This suggests mental models wherein teacher absenteeism in partially normalized, accountability concepts are heavily context‐variant, and sense of ownership for learning among poor students is low.

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