EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Early intervention in college classes and improved student outcomes

John Gordanier, William Hauk and Chandini Sankaran

Economics of Education Review, 2019, vol. 72, issue C, 23-29

Abstract: This research investigates the effectiveness of an early academic intervention in Principles of Economics courses at a large public university. After the end of the fourth week of classes, students who fell below a 70% threshold on a performance measure, or had an attendance rate below 75%, were referred to the university's Student Success Center for additional academic support. A referral consisted of students being informed of their status and being given optional assistance in course specific skills through tutoring, as well as training in general skills like time management and study skills. Using a regression discontinuity framework at the referral threshold, we find that the performance intervention improved student scores on common questions on the final exam by 6.5 to 7.5 percentage points for students at or near the performance threshold. The gains are particularly large for students who entered college with below average math placement scores. These results indicate that low-cost light-touch interventions may significantly affect student academic performance.

Keywords: College education; Student academic performance; Intervention; Economic education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775718305272
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Early Intervention in College Classes and Improved Student Outcomes (2018) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:72:y:2019:i:c:p:23-29

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.05.003

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:72:y:2019:i:c:p:23-29