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Molina, Ezequiel

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Molina, E.

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Last updated:August 25, 2025

Biography

Ezequiel Molina is a Senior Economist in the Global Practice for Education in Latin America at the World Bank, where he serves as the regional focal point for Teachers and Educational Technology (EdTech). He pioneered two flagship World Bank programs: Teach, a classroom observation tool designed to help countries track and improve teaching quality in primary, early childhood, and secondary education settings. He also spearheaded Coach, the World Bank's global initiative that helps countries improve in-service teacher professional development systems to accelerate learning. As an AI Champion, he guides World Bank staff in integrating artificial intelligence tools into their work and leads pilots exploring AI applications in education. At the intersection of research and practice, his work addresses critical challenges in global education. His publications in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and other leading journals examine teacher effectiveness and education service delivery in low- and middle-income countries. Through field research spanning Africa, East Asia, Latin America, and South Asia, he has contributed to advancing measurement tools and evidence-based approaches in education, with recent innovations being tested in Chile and Peru. Before his current role, he served as a Senior Economist in the Global Knowledge and Innovation Unit at the Education Global Practice and as a Global Lead for the World Bank's Teachers Thematic Group. His earlier work in the Africa HD Economic Unit, Poverty GP, and Governance GP culminated in significant contributions to the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law, shaping policy discourse on institutional reform and development. Throughout his career, Ezequiel has combined rigorous academic research with practical policy implementation. His work on Teach and Coach has been particularly influential in helping countries shift toward evidence-based teacher professional development systems that incorporate insights from adult learning and behavioral science. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Economy from Princeton University and both a B.A. and M.A. in Economics from La Plata National University in Argentina.

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Balancing the Digital Scales: Screen Time Management in Early Childhood Education
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-08-25) Molina, E.
Many existing approaches to screen time management rely on simplistic time limits or general warnings that fail to address the complex realities families face. Parents often turn to screens as practical solutions to everyday challenges—needing to complete tasks, manage difficult behaviors, or simply find moments of relief. The “digital babysitter” phenomenon reflects legitimate needs, not merely poor parenting choices. This report moves beyond simplistic frameworks to offer a nuanced, evidence-based approach that acknowledges both the developmental concerns and practical realities of raising children in a digital world. Drawing from over 80 studies across 18 countries and six world regions, we present a comprehensive analysis of screen time impacts and intervention effectiveness.
AI Revolution in Higher Education: What you need to know
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Molina, E.; Medina, E.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing Higher Education (HE), transforming how students learn, faculty teach, and institutions operate. Across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), AI-powered tools are being integrated into classrooms, research, and administrative processes, offering scalable and personalized solutions to improve educational access, efficiency, and equity. However, despite its vast potential, AI adoption in the region remains fragmented, hindered by infrastructure gaps, limited AI innovation, and challenges in faculty upskilling and talent retention. This report examines the transformative potential of AI in HE, focusing on key applications, challenges, and strategic recommendations for ethical integration. AI tools are already making a significant impact in student support, faculty research, and institutional management. Recent studies of well-designed Generative AI systems demonstrate promising results. For instance, AI-powered assignment platforms have increased student placement efficiency by 20% and improved options for under-assigned students by 38% (Larroucau et al., 2024). New studies of carefully implemented Generative AI tools demonstrate meaningful improvements in learning outcomes - a Harvard study found students using AI tutors learned more than twice as much in less time compared to active learning classrooms (Kestin et al., 2024), while a Stanford study demonstrated how AI-enhanced tutoring could effectively scale expert teaching practices, leading tutors to employ more effective pedagogical strategies while achieving improvements at a modest cost of $20 per tutor annually (Wang et al., 2025). These technologies are helping to close learning gaps and expand access to quality education, addressing Bloom’s “2 Sigma Problem” (Bloom, 1984) by offering personalized, 24/7 learning support that complements traditional teaching methods.
AI Revolution in Education: What You Need to Know
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-01) Molina, E.; Cobo, C.; Pineda, J.; Rovner, H.
The AI revolution is transforming education at an unprecedented pace, offering opportunities to personalize learning experiences, support teachers, and optimize education management. This brief explores nine key AI-driven innovations in Latin America and the Caribbean, divided into solutions for teachers, students, and administration. For teachers, AI-powered mentors and feedback systems are improving teacher recruitment, retention, and professional development. AI-assisted lesson planning and automated administrative tasks are empowering educators to focus on teaching and mentoring students. Students benefit from AI-powered tutoring systems that adapt to their individual needs. The brief also examines the use of generative AI for assignments and the need to foster responsible AI use. In education administration, AI streamlines processes, identifies at-risk students, and optimizes resource allocation, such as matching teachers to vacancies and students to schools. Navigating the promise and challenges of AI requires addressing key issues like digital divide, ethical governance, and limited evidence on effectiveness at scale. AI should enhance human expertise, not replace it. Policymakers must proactively shape the responsible development of AI to create an inclusive, innovative future of learning for all.
How Do We Know Teacher Professional Development Is Working?: Measuring Changes in Teaching Practices in the Classroom
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-10) del Toro Mijares, Ana Teresa; Luna-Bazaldua, Diego; Molina, Ezequiel; Pushparatnam, Adelle
The teaching that students receive in the classroom is the most important school-based determinant of student learning. The objective of this note is to provide guidance on how to: (1) establish a numerical indicator to measure changes in teaching practices through the use of classroom observation tools for use in education projects, and (2) produce a benchmark to compare changes in teaching practices through this indicator. The way that teachers interact with their students in the classroom makes all the difference in ensuring students’ academic and socioemotional learning. For this reason, education projects that seek to improve student learning frequently include components focused on improving teaching practices through interventions such as modifying the curriculum, improving pre-service or in-service teacher training, and integrating additional instructional support to the classroom through the use of structured instructional material or technology. This note provides guidance on how to establish a numerical indicator to measure teaching practices through classroom observation tools, and how to benchmark this indicator to track changes in teaching practices over time for use in educational interventions. This guidance is structured through a three-step process: step 1, selecting an appropriate classroom observation tool; step 2, selecting an indicator to track teaching practices using that tool; and step 3, establishing a reasonable benchmarking target for the chosen indicator.
Identifying Effective Teachers: Lessons from Four Classroom Observation Tools
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Molina, Ezequiel; Filmer, Deon; Wane, Waly
Four different classroom observation instruments -- from the Service Delivery Indicators, the Stallings Observation System, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, and the Teach classroom observation instrument -- were implemented in about 100 schools across four regions of Tanzania. The research design is such that various combinations of tools were administered to various combinations of teachers, so these data can be used to explore the commonalities and differences in the behaviors and practices captured by each tool, the internal properties of the tools (for example, how stable they are across enumerators, or how various indicators relate to one another), and how variables collected by the various tools compare to each other. Analysis shows that inter-rater reliability can be low, especially for some of the subjective ratings; principal components analysis suggests that lower-level constructs do not map neatly to predetermined higher-level ones and suggest that the data have only few dimensions. Measures collected during teacher observations are associated with student test scores, but patterns differ for teachers with lower versus higher subject content knowledge.
The Lost Human Capital: Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05) Bold, Tessa; Filmer, Deon; Molina, Ezequiel; Svensson, Jakob
In many low-income countries, teachers do not master the subject they are teaching, and children learn little while attending school. Using unique data from nationally representative surveys of schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper proposes a methodology to assess the effect of teacher subject content knowledge on student learning when panel data on students are not available. The paper shows that data on test scores of the student's current and the previous year's teachers, and knowledge of the correlation structure of teacher knowledge across time and grades, allow estimating two structural parameters of interest: the contemporaneous effect of teacher content knowledge, and the extent of fade out of teacher impacts in earlier grades. The paper uses these structural estimates to understand the magnitude of teacher effects and simulate the impacts of various policy reforms. Shortfalls in teachers' content knowledge account for 30 percent of the shortfall in learning relative to the curriculum, and about 20 percent of the cross-country difference in learning in the sample. Assigning more students to better teachers would potentially lead to substantial cost-savings, even if there are negative class-size effects. Ensuring that all incoming teachers have the officially mandated effective years of education, along with increasing the time spent on teaching to the officially mandated schedule, could almost double student learning within the next 30 years.
Evidence-Based Teaching: Effective Teaching Practices in Primary School Classrooms
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11) Molina, Ezequiel; Pushparatnam, Adelle; Rimm-Kaufman, Sara; Wong, Keri Ka-Yee
After spending five to six years sitting in a classroom almost every day for anywhere between 4 to 7 hours a significant share of students in low and middle-income countries are not able to read, write or do basic arithmetic. What is going on inside these classrooms? A growing body of evidence provide evidence of poor teaching practices and little to no learning going on inside the classroom. As such, the learning crisis is a reflection of a teaching crisis. What can teachers do inside the classroom to tackle this teaching and learning crisis? This paper systematizes the evidence on what are effective teaching practices in primary school classrooms, with special focus on evidence from low and middle-income countries. By doing so this paper provides the theoretical and empirical foundations for the content of Teach classroom observation tool. Implication for teacher education and evaluation are discussed.
Three Principles to Support Teacher Effectiveness During COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) Ding, Elaine; Beteille, Tara; Molina, Ezequiel; Pushparatnam, Adelle; Wilichowski, Tracy
Effective teachers are irreplaceable in helping students succeed. They facilitate two-way teaching and learning processes, helping students learn content through real time responses to questions, making learning fun, shaping students' attitudes, exemplifying empathy, modeling teamwork and respect, and building student resilience in several ways. Successful teachers work with school management teams and parents to ensure consistent support for students as they transition through school. The sudden closure of schools during COVID-19 has left many teachers across several countries uncertain about their role, unable to use technology effectively to communicate and teach, and unprepared for classroom challenges when schools reopen. The pandemic has brought the need to bridge digital divides into sharp focus, with countries and schools adept at using such technologies facing fewer challenges in meeting learning goals. There can be little doubt that high-quality education is a social experience, requiring routine human interface. Successful teachers are irreplaceable in this task—and will remain so in the foreseeable future—but they need to be supported in multiple ways to be effective in unpredictable circumstances. Given the central role teachers play in student learning, this note outlines three key principles to help governments and their development partners in supporting teacher effectiveness during and in the aftermath of COVID-19. It discusses these principles in relation to the three phases of the World Bank’s COVID-19 education policy response: coping, managing continuity, and improvement and acceleration.1 The three principles are basic and apply regardless of country context.
Making Great Strides Yet a Learning Crisis Remains in Tanzania: Results of the SDI and SABER service Delivery Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) Trako, Iva; Molina, Ezequiel; Asim, Salman
This report is organized as follows. Chapter one analyzes the emerging trends in the evolution of student’s learning outcomes in Tanzania’s primary schools and explores variations by region, ethnic-group and gender. Chapter two describes different dimensions and trends of teacher quality, such as teacher absence, content knowledge, pedagogical skills and teaching practices. Chapter three provides descriptive evidence on school governance and school management quality using the Development-World Management Survey. Chapter four presents detailed information on school inputs and infrastructure, as well as emerging trends. Chapter five provides a more general description of the different types of support available to students and their engagement to learning. Chapter six analysis the correlation between service delivery indicators and learning outcomes and provides suggestive evidence on key observable factors associated with highest gains in test scores. Chapter seven concludes by providing some clear lessons and priority areas for action.
Community Monitoring Interventions to Curb Corruption and Increase Access and Quality in Service Delivery: A Systematic Review
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-09-27) Molina, Ezequiel; Carella, Laura; Pacheco, Ana; Cruces, Guillermo; Gasparini, Leonardo
There is a belief that allowing communities monitoring power over providers could be beneficial for improving service delivery and reducing corruption in service delivery. In community monitoring interventions (CMIs), the community is given the opportunity to observe and assess providers’ performance and provide feedback to providers and politicians. This systematic review and meta-analysis appraises and synthesises evidence on the effects of CMIs on access and quality of service delivery and corruption outcomes in low and middle-income countries. The results indicate evidence of beneficial effects of CMIs on service delivery quality and on helping to curb corruption. The potential benefits of CMIs on access to and quality of services are likely to be higher when interventions are designed so that contact between both actors are promoted, and tools for citizens to monitor agents’ performance are provided. However, more rigorous research is needed to address this hypothesis.