Paper Info
Title
Comparing The Effectiveness Of Two Remedial Mathematics Courses Using Modern Regression Discontinuity Techniques
Abstract
Studying the effectiveness of remedial courses in higher education has attracted a lot of interest from educational researchers and practitioners. Remediation is associated with significant economic and social costs while the results are usually dubious. In this paper, we apply a widely used method called Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to measure the effectiveness of two differently designed remedial mathematics courses at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Our large-scale study is based on data of almost 20,000 undergraduate students enrolled between 2010 and 2018. Using modern RDD tools in various settings, we study both the direct and longer-term effects of remediation; and find that the design of the remedial course matters a lot. We measured a statistically significant positive effect on subsequent academic achievement for both course designs; however, the magnitude of the effect differs substantially. We measured a higher effect for the remedial course that serves as an extra practice class for the university level calculus course than for traditional remediation. As a methodological novelty, we propose a novel alternative method to handle discrete running variable in the RDD setting. We also provide some suggestions on how to improve mathematical remediation using personalized e-learning systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1080/10494820.2020.1839506
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Mathematics remediation, higher education, regression discontinuity design, jittered regression, educational data science
Journal
29
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1049-4820
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Máté Baranyi100.34
Roland Molontay213.08