Improving Math Skills Using Concurrent Support Courses for Introductory Microeconomics

Overview

We use experimental data from an R1 PhD-granting university to estimate the impact of two types of one-credit supplemental support courses on student performance in Introductory Microeconomics. One version of the course focused on improving math skills, while the other helped students with more general economic problem solving. We employ difference-and-differences and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs to obtain estimates of treatment-on-the-treated effects and local average treatment effects respectively.

Our preliminary results show that the math-focused supplemental course improved students’ mathematics skills for all attending students, and, to a much greater extent, for students who received lower scores on the math assessment at the beginning of the term. The latter effect is smaller but still present for the economics-focused supplemental course. Furthermore, our preliminary results suggest that the courses improved student performance on a standard introductory economics end-of-semester assessment. We find no statistically significant effects of either supplemental course on midterm or final exam scores.

We are currently expanding our analysis to include an additional semester of data to improve the precision of our estimates.