Posts
Anna McDougall, undergraduate research assistant, Douglas McKee, senior lecture and George Orlov, postdoctoral associate at the Cornell University Department of Economics explains, When it comes to remote learning, teacher experience, active learning, and peer interaction can help.
Students work together outside Warren Hall at Cornell University.
The effectiveness of online learning in higher education is an open question: While some research finds that students who have lower GPAs or who are male, Black, or younger tend to perform relatively worse, other scholars have found that student learning can be just as successful in online classes as in in-person classes. In our recent work with James Berry, Austin Boyle, Thomas J. DiCiccio, Alex Rees-Jones, Tyler Ransom, and Jörg Stoye, we asked whether the challenge of the pandemic-induced switch to online teaching negatively affected student learning, and, if so, whether certain demographic groups were affected more than others. Further, we wanted to see if there were factors, such as particular pedagogical approaches, that could mitigate potential negative effects.
To do so, we examined students’ performance on standardized assessments, developed as part of the Active Learning Initiative at Cornell University, in seven intermediate-level economics courses at four PhD-granting institutions in semesters before and during the pandemic: Spring and Fall 2019, and Spring 2020. Not all teaching during the Spring 2020 term took place online, but each of the questions on these assessments is associated with specific course learning goals, so we were able to calculate separate assessment scores for material learned before and after the switch to remote learning...
An alleviation of the practical and mental difficulties caused by the pandemic appears to be on the horizon. We hope that some of the lessons learned during the pandemic, however, will stay with us and inform teaching practices in the future.
Source: EducationNext
