Economic Education in Post-Soviet Russia: The Effectiveness of the Training of Trainers Program

The authors examined the Council for Economic Education's Training of Trainers program's effectiveness in post-Soviet Russia by evaluating teacher and student learning. The authors employed a randomization of teachers across treatment and control groups at two separate stages of the research design and found that participation in the workshop delivered by native Russian trainers improved teachers' Test of Economic Literacy scores by approximately 10 percent, when they held all else constant. The authors also found that student learning was greater for students who were taught by teachers trained by program graduates, ceteris paribus. When the workshop's impacts were further examined, the authors found that pedagogy and materials had a statistically significant impact of substantive magnitude on student learning. This result indicates that additional research is needed to determine the cost-effectiveness of teacher training versus curriculum distribution.