What Do Students Remember after the Course is over?
Overview
While written exams are commonly used to measure student learning during or at the end of a course, research on the amount of material students retain after the course is over and the factors associated with that retention is very limited. This project comprises three distinct studies that use unique data to examine the retention of economics skills after course completion. We measure student skills using standard low-stakes assessments given regularly at our institution at the beginning and end of the term in many courses.
In our first study, the Economic Statistics Skills Assessment (ESSA) is administered at the end of an introductory statistics course, and at the start of a subsequent econometrics course. The difference in ESSA scores for students who took their second test between 1.5 months and more than a year later is used as a measure of statistics skills retention.
In our second study, the Applied Econometrics Skills Assessment (AESA) is administered at the end of an econometrics course and again one year later when we also ask students to complete a short survey about their activities during the interim period.
Our third study is the most ambitious and is funded by NSF Award 2021094: We follow up with students who took courses in introductory microeconomics and intermediate microeconomics. These courses were sometimes taught as pure lectures and sometimes used active learning pedagogy. Some of these courses were taught in-person and some were taught online. This variation in pedagogy and modality allows us to estimate the effect of these course characteristics on knowledge retention. All students in these courses took a low-stakes standard assessment of their learning at the end of the term. At follow-ups, one to three years later, these students were surveyed about their academic and job-related activities, and given the same assessment they took at the end of the course.