questionnaire. Table 8 presents these results: we see that HRS is prevalent among the low performing schools clearly for the job satisfaction and ability/effort domains.<sup>23</sup>

# 8. Limitations and Caveats

There are two possible limitations/threats to the identification of HRS as we have demonstrated it here. Both relate to concerns about whether we are actually measuring HRS. We discuss these in turn:

**Social Desirability Bias:** Interpreting perceptions about self and other teachers poses some difficulties. One concern is that differences between the two could simply reflect ‘social‐desirability biases’. 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).

There are two reasons why results from this survey experiment are more likely to reflect HRS than social‐desirability bias. First, the surveys are totally self‐administered and anonymized. Teachers are given a paper survey to fill out by independent field‐enumerators, no school administrators are in the room when teachers fill out the survey, and within the survey there are no teacher identification questions. Further messages of anonymity are emphasized by the enumerators in their directions and as footers in each page on the survey.

Second, the teacher responses themselves do not reflect any consistent/clear pattern around social‐ desirability.

**Information Bias** : There is also the possibility that the pattern of responses observed in social‐ assessment surveys reflect not HRS, but simply teachers’ inability to gauge what other teachers know and do. This concern is addressed through the use of a five‐point Likert scale that allows us to create a finer‐grained scale. Specifically, the response scale includes an option for ‘Neutral’ and also distinguishes between ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly Agree’. For each specification in Table 4, we show regression results both including and excluding ‘Neutral’ in the coding of a favorable response and also only including ‘Strongly Agree’ in the coding of a favorable response. Adding the neutral option reduces the probability that respondents commit to a certain position when they do not have it.

# 9. Conclusion

We examine self‐beliefs on effort and ability in a sample of secondary school teachers in PPP schools in Uganda. We find that teachers tend to hold more favorable opinions of themselves than of other teachers in the same school ‐ in terms of ability, effort, and job‐satisfaction. We call this tendency High Relative Self‐Regard (HRS) and find that it correlates negatively with objective indicators of effort.

These findings appear indicative of cognitive biases that help teachers rationalize sub‐optimal effort in classrooms. If teachers view themselves as exerting more effort and exhibiting stronger work‐ethic than their colleagues, then this allows them to more readily exculpate themselves from low learning

> 23 Appendix Tables 3A to 3D show results for each module under alternate coding specifications of the Likert scale, and also report results for schools above or below the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile.

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