# 1. Introduction

“ _In interacting with the environment ... people form internal, mental models of themselves and of the things with which they are interacting. These models provide predictive and explanatory power for understanding the interaction_ .” Norman (1983, 7) Two sets of research findings on teachers are particularly striking, especially in relation to each other. First, teacher effort is sub‐optimal in many developing countries (World Bank 2017). Teachers are often absent from school, when in school they are often not teaching, and when teaching they are often not teaching well (Bruns and Luque 2014, Chaudhury et al. 2006, Bold et al. 2017). Second, it is difficult to increase teacher presence through incentives alone. Several studies find little or no effect of various incentive interventions on teacher presence<sup>1</sup> (Banerjee and Duflo 2006, Glewwe et al. 2010, Kremer et al. 2013, World Bank 2017). Even <mark>higher salaries for teachers might not improve attendance (De Ree et al. 2015).</mark> Further, teacher absenteeism rates have changed very little over time in several contexts.<sup>2</sup> Why is this? Why do teachers rarely respond to performance‐incentives through increased effort, despite large margins for improvements? One possibility is that teachers do not increase effort because they do not believe they can increase effort. In other words, teachers might feel that they are exerting as much effort as they can or as they should because of their mental models. Mental models reflect an understanding or an outlook of the world that is shared by members of a community. Behavioral economics and social psychology demonstrate that individual decision‐making is often influenced by these mental models (World Bank 2014). This paper applies these ideas to teacher beliefs about their own effort. Specifically, we examine teacher mental models on three correlates of effort—absenteeism, accountability, and ownership of student learning —using survey data from 16,000 teachers across eight developing countries,<sup>3</sup> spanning five regions.<sup>4</sup> Why is it important to consider teachers’ mental models? Mental models shape the way people perceive themselves and their environment (Norman 1983). They are the internal representations that individuals create to interpret their environment (Denzau and North 1994). By extension, mental models represent a shared understanding of a common context by a group, e.g., teachers. These determine what individuals believe is desirable, possible, or even “thinkable” (World Bank 2014). Because mental models are used for filtering and interpreting information, they influence

> 1 Two studies from India show that teacher attendance improves in the presence of a strong extrinsic monitoring shock. In the first, financial incentives tied to attendance are combined with stringent monitoring through daily photos of the teacher with her students reduced teacher absence rates by 21 percentage points (Duflo, Hanna and Ryan 2012). In the second, increasing the probability of a school having been inspected in the past three months from 0 to 1 is correlated with a 7‐percentage point reduction in teacher absence (Muralidharan et al. 2017).

> 2 Two studies in India 9 years apart find teacher absence rates changed from 26.3% to 23.7% (Kremer et al 2005, Muralidharan et al 2014). Absenteeism rates for Tanzania (Zanzibar) and Uganda across different rounds of the Service Delivery Indicator survey show very little change.

> 3 Afghanistan, Argentina, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Senegal, Tajikistan, and Tanzania (Zanzibar).

> 4 Sub‐Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and Latin America.

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