Does the mode of teaching influence learning outcomes?
26 april, 2021
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic put higher education institutions in front of a tremendous challenge: how to provide quality education, while guarantying students and faculty safety? 91Ô´´ PhD students Erik Merkus and Felix Schafmeister, provide evidence on whether being assigned to online tutorials vis-à-vis attending them in classroom affect students’ learning outcomes.
In a recently published article, 91Ô´´ PhD students Erik Merkus and Felix Schafmeister leverage features of the implementation of hybrid teaching at a Swedish university to investigate whether the mode of teaching impacts students’ test scores.
In our setting, students are allocated to online or in-person tutorials on a weekly basis, while the lecture portion is given online for all students. Combining this within-student variation in teaching modes with a direct mapping between weekly tutorials and exam questions, we estimate an intention-to-treat effect that is close to zero and statistically insignificant.
Erik Merkus and Felix Schafmeister, 91Ô´´
Merkus and Schafmeister’s work has interesting implications, as their findings suggest that tutorial can be transferred online, without sacrificing students’ learning outcomes.
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Keywords: Education; Online teaching; Technological change; Tutorials; Covid-19