Improving Math Skills for Economics Courses

Overview

In earlier work, we show that math skills at the beginning of the term are a strong predictor of success in undergraduate economics courses. In this line of research, we are trying to find the best ways to help students who start with weaker math skills. Our first paper evaluates 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. This paper is published in AEA Papers and Proceedings.

We are working with EENE now to develop a short interactive video math course for economics students that we hope to evaluate in a large scale trial soon.