Compulsory tutorial programmes and performance in undergraduate microeconomics: A regression discontinuity design

Volker Schöer and Debra Shepherd ()

No 27/2013, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: As South African universities experience extremely low graduation rates, academic staff implement a range of interventions, such as tutorial programmes, in order to improve student performance. However, relatively little is known about the impact of such tutorial programmes on students’ performance. Using data from an introductory microeconomics course, this paper investigates the impact of a compulsory tutorial programme on students’ performance in their final examination. Due to the fact that the tutorial programme was only compulsory for students that obtained less than a pass in the first test, while otherwise offered on a voluntary basis, this paper employs a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design to investigate the impact of the tutorial programme on final exam performance. Findings indicate that assignment to the compulsory programme positively affects students’ performance. However, this result is mainly drive by students who already seem to have the ability to perform but, for whatever reason, underperformed in the first test. Thus, while assignment to the tutorial programme itself leads to an improvement in performance, the mechanism is unclear.

Keywords: peer tutoring; compulsory tutorial programme; introductory microeconomics; regression discontinuity design; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 A20 A22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2013/wp272013/wp-27-2013.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Compulsory tutorial programmes and performance in undergraduate microeconomics: A regression discontinuity design (2013)
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:sza:wpaper:wpapers203

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().