Conference sessions in Student outcomes

‘And I must borrow every changing shape’: Changing perceptions in the value of a University degree, repercussions for Economics

Does acquiring a degree really have value? The standard answer, formulated in education economics, is one which is founded in basic human capital orthodoxy. This results in the continued reiteration of the positive reputation of higher education, where attractive investment outcomes are presented via the comparison of tuition fees with significant expected gain in lifetime earnings. We argue that this approach is inadequate because there is typically a substantial gap between objective and subjective perceptions of value. To investigate the importance of this gap, a two-stage approach is adopted. This initially offers an empirical investigation probing the characteristics of subjective perceptions of value. We test for deterioration over time and investigate the probable indicators that could explain such worsening. Focusing on aspects such as cultural capital and the congestion hypothesis, we then use this empirical analysis to inform the second part of our paper: investigating the repercussions for the future design of economics education. We discuss the need for more radical change in the pedagogical approaches that are typically adopted, where more flexible methods are required to shift emphasis away from the standard lecture format which still stubbornly anchors itself in the repetitive application of core theoretical concepts.

Introducing CORE’s The Economy — Evaluating students’ exam performance

CORE Economics provides novel material for teaching first year undergraduate economics. Since its launch in 2013, the CORE e-book has attracted significant interest from all sides of the economic spectrum. A question often asked, however, is how easily the material can be integrated in an existing curriculum and how well students perform in subsequent years. Some simple descriptive statistics suggest that, compared to previous cohorts, CORE students from a major UK Higher Education institution have on average performed better than non-CORE cohorts. This project aims to establish a causal link between second year performance and having had CORE economics in year 1 using regression analysis. Our aim is to perform a Difference in Difference estimation, comparing the performance of those second year students which have been exposed to the CORE course with those joint degree students who have taken first year economics at other places.

Learning Gain and Confidence Gain as Metrics for Pedagogical Effectiveness

This presentation details the most recent results and outputs of an HEFCE funded pedagogical research project aimed at investigating the concept of ‘learning gain’ as a measure of pedagogical effectiveness. Our approach originates from the principle that students ought to develop positive self-efficacy beliefs as they progress over their academic journey. We re-enforce this concept by suggesting that student confidence should represent a learning outcome in its own right. In other words, we claim that the development of student self-efficacy should: (i) run parallel to every academic curriculum, and (ii) be subject to assessment and evaluation, along with the accumulation of knowledge, practical, and critical skills. To achieve this objective, we design and evaluate a pedagogical approach where students and staff can promote and track the simultaneous formation of learning gain and confidence gain. In the first part of the presentation we describe our teaching approach, which combines pedagogies such as self-assessment and peer-Instruction, to facilitate the creation of an active learning environment for a large-class undergraduate module in Introductory Macroeconomics. In the second part of the presentation we introduce our definitions of learning gain and confidence gain. Thus, we describe how these definitions can be employed to develop an evidence-based evaluation of our teaching approach. We argue that a comprehensive appraisal of teaching quality should evaluate learning gain in relation to measures of student self-assessment skills and self-efficacy beliefs. Therefore, we investigate the interplay of these metrics to assess pedagogical effectiveness.

• Powerpoint slides

Characteristics that Predict the Likelihood of a Student Experiencing Grade Success in Principles of Micro and Macroeconomics

While much attention has focused on the factors affecting student performance in principles of economics, far less consideration has been paid to factors affecting attrition. Using student transcripts from five institutions over a 23-year timespan, we investigate enrollments in principles to determine characteristics of both successful and unsuccessful students. Lack of success is defined as either withdrawing from the course or as earning a grade that would not generally allow continued study, i.e., a grade below C- or an unsatisfactory or incomplete. Principles of microeconomics students tend to be early in their undergraduate careers, male, and Caucasian. We find that micro principles students come from a range of majors with large shares from business and engineering, math and physics. Unsuccessful micro students tend to be female, minority, have a lower cumulative GPA, and to be majoring in something other than economics, business, engineering, math or physics. Analysis of the principles of macroeconomics course is underway to determine whether a different set of characteristics explain success rates across introductory courses.