teachers that do this tend to also provide less effort. At the same time, schools where teachers over‐ rate themselves also perform worse. However, it is important to note that causality might also run in the other direction. Low‐performing teachers might feel a greater need to justify themselves and therefore have a higher tendency to exhibit HRS.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it illuminates possible mechanisms through which teachers might rationalize sub‐optimally low levels of effort. This might happen via HRS in two ways: (i) HRS makes teachers over‐estimate their actual effort or ability; and (ii) HRS makes it easier for teachers to blame other teachers for low student learning. Second, it highlights the potential importance of objective feedback<sup>8</sup> provision to teachers – beyond student assessment information.<sup>9</sup> Note that provision of such feedback, by itself, may be insufficient to change teacher behavior.<sup>10</sup> However, these results suggest that it could form a useful component of broader efforts to realign teacher incentive and accountability structures. This is because objective information would help address cognitive biases that prevent teachers from internalizing shortcomings in their effort and ability. As such, it could also increase the effectiveness of teacher incentive schemes and possibly reduce the risk that teachers respond to performance‐based incentives only through counter‐ productive ways like cheating or teaching to the test.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the setting, experimental design, and data. Section 3 examines summary statistics and presents a snapshot of self‐assessment data. Section 4 uses the experiment to establish the extent of HRS. Section 5 examines heterogeneity in HRS based on other teacher characteristics; Section 6 explores links between HRS and actual measures of effort. Heterogeneity in HRS based on selected school characteristics is presented in Section 7. Section 8 lays out limitations and caveats around this work and Section 9 concludes.

# 2. Setting, Data, and Experimental Design

**Setting** : In this paper, we ask ‐ how do teachers view themselves relative to other teachers in the school?  To answer this question, we rely on a randomized survey experiment conducted within a

> 8 Subjective feedback may give rise to other biases and dysfunctional responses (Milgrom 1988, Milgrom and Roberts 1988).

> 9 There is some experimental evidence on the potential benefits of providing teachers with feedback about student performance (see Muralidharan and Sundaraman 2010, Piper and Korda 2006 etc.). However, there has been less discussion on the benefits of providing teachers with objective information about their actual effort and ability. This distinction is important because teachers might find it easier to distance themselves from the former than the latter. Coe (1998) reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of feedback on performance in general and highlights the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of feedback systems in improving students' academic performance. Also, <mark>in the book, Visible Learning for Teachers (Hattie 2012), the authors emphasize that the most powerful feedback is that given from the student to the teacher. This feedback allows teachers to see learning through the eyes of their students. It makes learning visible and facilitates the planning of next steps.</mark>

> 10 Muralidharan and Sundaraman (2010) evaluate the impact of providing teachers in India with detailed diagnostic feedback on student performance. They found that the feedback reports were used more effectively by teachers when combined with performance‐linked bonuses for teachers. However, without such incentives, feedback provision had no detectable impact on student learning.

4