The determination of college students' academic performance is an important issue in higher education. Whether students' attendance at lectures affects students' exam performance has received considerable attention. The authors conduct a randomized experiment to study the average attendance effect for students who choose to attend lectures, which is known in program evaluation literature as the average treatment effect on the treated. This effect has long been neglected by researchers when estimating the impact of lecture attendance on students' academic performance. Under the randomized experiment approach, the results suggest that class attendance has a positive and significant impact on college students' exam performance. On average, the effect of attending lectures corresponds to a 9.4 percent to 18.0 percent improvement in exam performance for those who choose to attend classes. In comparison, the improvement is only 5.1 percent, using the empirical method of existing studies, which measures the overall average attendance impact.
This study considers the effect of cumulative class attendance while estimating the relationship between class attendance and students' exam performance, using an individual-level data. We find that, cumulative attendance has produced a positive and significant impact on students' exam performance. Attending lectures corresponds to a 4% improvement in exam performance, and the marginal impact of cumulative attendance on exam performance is also close to 4%. It is of note that the impact of attendance on exam performance is reduced about 0.4% after one controls for the cumulative attendance effect.
With the availability of new information technology, PowerPoint presentations have been used extensively in classrooms for higher education, in addition to traditional chalk-and-talk presentations. However, their effectiveness is much less clear.The main purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not downloading PowerPoint slides before a class has any impact on students' learning outcomes for that class, using a panel data set.The estimation results show a nontrivial lecture slides effect. After controlling for students' unobserved individual heterogeneity and exam difficulty, downloading lecture slides before a class improves students' examination performance by 3.48 per cent.This finding suggests that instructors could help students improve their academic performance by supplying PowerPoint slides.
[Excerpt] As the large baby boomer generation retires, the workforce will lose much of their knowledge and experience. Encouraging phased retirement, in which older workers reduce their work hours with their current employer to transition into retirement, has been cited by retirement experts as one way to mitigate this loss. GAO was asked to review the work patterns of older Americans and phased retirement programs. In this report, GAO examines (1) recent trends in the labor force participation of older workers, (2) the extent to which employers have adopted phased retirement programs and what type of employers offer them, and (3) what challenges and benefits, if any, exist in designing and operating phased retirement programs. GAO analyzed data from two nationally representative surveys, the Health and Retirement Study (2004-2014) and the Current Population Survey (2005-2016); reviewed relevant federal laws and regulations; conducted a literature review; and interviewed 16 experts on retirement and 9 employers who offer or considered offering phased retirement programs. While phased retirement programs exist in both the private sector and government, this report focuses on private sector programs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.