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Does the mode of teaching influence learning outcomes?

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? SSE 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, SSE 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, SSE

Merkus and Schafmeister’s work has interesting implications, as their findings suggest that tutorial can be transferred online, without sacrificing students’ learning outcomes.

Keywords: Education; Online teaching; Technological change; Tutorials; Covid-19
Dept. of Economics Education Digitalization Economics Journal Paper Publication