Should We Trust Math Preparatory Courses? An Empirical Analysis on the Impact of Students' Participation and Attendance on Short- and Medium-Term Effects

Stefan Buechele ()
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Stefan Buechele: University of Kassel

MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: Remedial courses, particularly in math, have become indispensable in today's higher education landscape. However, large scale evaluation studies investigating the effectiveness of such courses find mixed results which is only one reason why remedial courses should not be trusted as a functional instrument in general. Besides the unclear impact on students' skills, research mostly does not control properly for the students' attendance in these courses. This study gives an insight into the differences in students' participation, attendance and the resulting consequences for short-, and medium term effects. Therefore, over three periods of time, data on several variables and standardized skill-test outcomes was raised, leading to a sample of N=1,236 students enrolled in subjects of economics to investigate short term effects, while a sub sample of N=501 students could be matched to measure a medium term effect using a fixed-effects approach.

Keywords: Program Evaluation; Math Remediation; Higher Education; Math Skills; Freshmen Students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mar:magkse:201927

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