When students fail an examination at the end of their first year, they are offered a free resit examination, which they merely need to pass to progress into the second year. These resits anecdotally provide a dual purpose of testing that students have achieved the required level of attainment to progress, and to incentivise additional effort from these low attaining students. This paper uses regression discontinuity design to attempt to estimate the effect of resits in first year statistics with econometrics examinations on future outcomes. Whilst resits alone appear to make zero significant effect on outcomes, students who perform well on the resit examination perform 0.7 standard deviations better in second year microeconomics than similar students who do not receive resit examinations. These effects, if replicated more widely, could be worth up to £48,000 across the lifetime of each student.
We study the effect of a sharp, exogenous, and repeated change in the value of leisure on educational achievement, arising from the overlap of major international football tournaments with high-stakes tests. Using administrative data covering almost all students in England, we find a significant negative average effect of the tournament on exam performance. The odds of reaching the achievement benchmark fall by 12% on average, considerably more for students likely to be interested in football. Analysis of within-student variation shows a 0.02 SD fall in grades, 0.06SD for the interested. We interpret our results as reflecting changes in student effort.
INTRODUCTION. Active learning has been demonstrated to lead to better learning outcomes for students within education, but within higher education institutions, there are still a wide range of barriers that prevent active learning from taking place.
METHOD. In this article, I discuss some of the key barriers, including the design of the teaching space, the use of new technologies (such as lecture capture), and challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
RESULTS & DISCUSSION. Much of the literature suggests that, whilst there are structural barriers that discourage the use of active learning (such as the built environment), it is not sufficient to merely remove these barriers, but it is also important to create a demand from educators (and students) for newer, active pedagogies.
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.