Teaching Impact
I was able to test my teaching impact and a method for continuous improvement on students' outcomes in an undergraduate econometric recitation session at Texas A&M University covering instrumental variable estimation. In this class, I administered a pre-quiz and an identical post-quiz. Immediately after the pre-quiz, I introduced an exercise during class. Points did not not count towards the grade. The quizzes were purely for learning purposes. I split students randomly into two groups, one group was encouraged to talk to their neighbors during the exercise and the other was not. All students were in the same room. While this is certainly not a perfect experimental set-up, it provided very useful feedback to the students and myself to improve my teaching. Given the transparency and success the method creates, I plan to use it in my future teaching. The graph below shows the results.
My students have accumulated three to five times the knowledge about instrumental variable estimation. Over both groups, students had on average the same initial knowledge. However, students allowed to interact with their neighbors during the exercise improved their scores by more than the ones who did not. The exercise itself was unrelated to the questions from the quiz and immediately after the exercise, the answers were provided to the whole class. Since there was no differential opportunity to knowledge, it is very likely that students' attention increased due to the discussion with the neighbor which ultimately improved retention. The average student did not answer all questions correct after the un-incentivized post quiz (8 points). This indicates that there is some room for students to study as well as some teaching interventions that can further assist in improving students' outcomes.
Please find my recitation session pre-quiz, post-quiz and the exercise below which was sparked during a course from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning.
- Pre-Quiz,
- Post-Quiz,
- Excercise Alone,
- Exercise in Group
Please find my recitation session pre-quiz, post-quiz and the exercise below which was sparked during a course from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning.
- Pre-Quiz,
- Post-Quiz,
- Excercise Alone,
- Exercise in Group
