Bradley Hunter and Dr. Eric Eide, Economics Department
Introduction
Every semester, each of the fifteen teaching assistants for Economics 110 classes hold two weekly review sessions, during which they solve practice test questions, discuss the implications of lecture material, and help students solidify difficult concepts. These review sessions, while provided at a relatively low cost by the Economics department (approximately $4500), also constitute for an estimated 100 student-hours per week in just one of BYU’s six sections of Econ 110.
Both teaching assistants and professors believe that regular attendance at these weekly review sessions will improve a student’s understanding of Economics and his/her ultimate performance in the class; however, the extent to which regular review attendance improves test scores is still unclear. To the knowledge of the author, no previous attempts have been made to quantify the effect of review sessions on Econ 110 performance.
If review sessions are indeed effective, as we expect them to be, then they are vastly underutilized (less than 25%) by the student body. One way to extend the reach of these review sessions is to identify the key determinants of review session attendance. Doing so enables Econ 110 professors and teaching assistants to identify which sub-groups are most likely to underutilize the review sessions. This allows for the development of new recruiting strategies in order to help more students succeed in their elementary study of Economics.
The two questions this research seeks to answer are “Who’s coming to the reviews, and who isn’t coming?” and “How much better off is a student for coming to the weekly reviews?” In order to answer these question, data was gathered on the students who choose to come and on those who choose not to come to weekly review sessions and regressions were run on their review session attendance as well as their grade in the class as a function of gender, GPA, standardized test scores, age, year in school, and major to identify the most significant predictors of both attendance and non-attendance of review sessions.
Methods
Attendance was taken by teaching assistants at bi-weekly review sessions for Professor Mark Showalter’s Economics 110 class. The attendance data was linked with descriptive variables for the students (age, sex, major, GPA, ACT score, year in school). Student data was only used if the student signed a consent form which was provided to students during one of their Economics 110 classes. Data analysis was performed using STATA 9.0 (College Station, TX).
Results
A total of 58 students filled out the survey. An initial regression of the variables against the students’ grades in the class showed that each successive review raises a student’s grade in the class by .09 grade points (.33 grade points is the equivalent of moving from a B to a B+, or moving up one letter grade). The p-value was .01, r2 = 0.51. A subsequent regression included a dummy variable for ever attending a review session. This second model resulted in a coefficient of 0.57 grade points difference in students who attended, even once, compared with those who never attended a review session (p value = .037, r2 = 0.51). The coefficient for additional attendance was .03 and was not statistically significant. ACT score was correlated with better performance in the class (0.17 grade point increase per one point increase in ACT score). For attendance, class standing was a predictor of attendance. Seniors were mostly likely to attend, followed by juniors, sophomores, and then freshmen. High performers were more likely to attend, while ACT score was negatively correlated with attendance. All of these results were statistically significant.
Discussion
This study likely uncovers more about the character or work ethic of those attending the review sessions than it does about the inherent effect of the review sessions themselves. The fact that a dummy variable for attending a review session even once erased the benefit of attending an additional review session leads to the conclusion that students who attend these review sessions are substituting self-study for these review sessions. They likely would perform about the same in the class if they did not attend and simply studied on their own. Because a student was more likely to attend the review session if they had been at BYU for a longer period of time, it is likely that over time, students learn that attending teaching assistant-led review sessions is a more efficient use of time than self-study alone. For this reason, it appears that review sessions are a good idea as they save study time for the students which they are able to then use in more productive ways (studying for other classes, working, etc). If the economics department is holding review sessions for this purpose, than they should be continued. If they are held to increase the grades of the students, then they should not be held as they have little effect on a student’s eventual grade in the class.