Abstract
This paper presents new evidence on the dynamic treatment effects of class attendance on academic performance. The analysis is based on a dataset from a large introductory statistics course and a dynamic modeling framework of Ding and Lehrer (Rev Econ Stat 92(1):31–42, 2010). The course had seven progressive assessments spread across a thirteen-week semester. Assessment test scores were matched to individual student attendance records. We use a panel dataset to study the dynamic interactions over time and between learning activities including lectures and tutorials, while accounting for reverse causality and self-selection without resorting to instruments for attendance or discontinuity design. Class attendance is found to have a test score return rate of 1.3 percentage points per lecture and 1 percentage point per tutorial. For both lecture and tutorial attendances, the contemporaneous effect dominates the lagged effect, with the effects accumulating over time. We also find a substitution rather than complementarity effect between lecture attendance and tutorial attendance, but the former has a stronger effect on test scores than the latter. Our results also show these effects are stronger for under-performing students.
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Notes
As we use quiz 1 as a control for student fixed effects, we only use the attendance for weeks 3–4 to match with the midterm examination.
In the estimation of Eq. (5), the inclusion/exclusion of quiz 1 score as a control for \(v_{i}\) affects the magnitude of coefficients on \(L_{i1}\) and \(T_{i1}\) substantially. This implies that other observed characteristics are quite limited in accounting for student heterogeneity.
The cumulative interactive effect \((\sum _{t=1}^{2}L_{t}+T_{t}+L_{t}T_{t})\) is also smaller than the cumulative effect of lecture attendance \((L_{1}+L_{2})\). We do not pay as much attention to this result because we already know that \(L_{1}\) and \(T_{1}\) do not contribute much to the score of test 2.
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We would like to thank the editor, the associate editor and the reviewer for their constructive comments, which have greatly improved the manuscript. We also thank Zi Yin for his excellent research assistance. The research of the first author was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2008-362-A00001).
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Kwak, D.W., Sherwood, C. & Tang, K.K. Class attendance and learning outcome. Empir Econ 57, 177–203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-018-1434-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-018-1434-7