Lecture Attendance: Who Comes, Why They Come, and What It All Means

Lecture Attendance: Who Comes, Why They Come, and What It All Means

Students at Yale feel no obligation to attend lecture. They often tell me that if they aren’t getting anything out of lecture, they’ll just stop going. As an economist, the idea that students are simply making a rational choice appeals to me. As a professor who currently sees about half his students coming to lecture, I find it somewhat distressing.

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Balancing Research and Teaching at an Elite University

Balancing Research and Teaching at an Elite University

A few weeks ago a reporter for the Yale Herald (“Yale’s most daring publication since 1986”) interviewed me about teaching at Yale. We had a long pleasant talk, and the resulting article was just published. Many faculty are quoted, but it seems I was willing to say the most extreme things and thus got fairly high billing. I don’t (yet) regret anything I said, but I do want to flesh out a few points.

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Homework and Potty Math

Homework and Potty Math

I was talking another parent the other day and she mentioned that her first grader gets homework every night. I was a little jealous because, believe it or not, I have fond memories of homework in elementary school. My older daughter’s school believes in kids working hard during the school day and then having fun and decompressing afterward, and they rarely assign homework.

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Study Habits, Lecture Attendance, and Exam Performance

Study Habits, Lecture Attendance, and Exam Performance

Now that I have a fair bit of data on my students’ performance and participation in the class, I’ve been champing at the bit to start analyzing it. I figured this would have to wait until the end of the semester since my plate is pretty full with class prep and other responsibilities, but the other day over lunch, my friend Edward and I had a great idea: Why not combine the two and analyze the data during lecture? It would make a great introduction to multiple regression and hopefully teach students how to use their study time more efficiently.

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Test locations and test scores

Test locations and test scores

My econometrics class has about 150 students, and that’s exactly the capacity of our regular classroom. It works fine for lectures since not everyone shows up and I want them sitting close together as they work through problems. For our midterm exam, however, this would have been just awful. Luckily, I was able to additionally reserve the room across the hall that holds 170. This let me split the class evenly between the two rooms and give everyone space to breathe. And because I used random assignment, I had a natural experiment to test the effect of location on exam performance.

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Midterm Review

Midterm Review

The other day one of my students came up to me after class and asked if I would be holding a review session before our upcoming midterm exam. I said I would not because I was philosophically opposed to review sessions. Maybe this was a little dramatic, but I do think most review sessions are counter-productive.

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