Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP13883
Authors: Jan Feld; Nicols Salamanca; Ulf Zlitz
Abstract: A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students’ current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students’ course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: I21; I24; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Instructor academic rank (A29) | Student outcomes (I21) |
| Instructor academic rank (A29) | Value-added measures (C52) |
| Value-added measures (C52) | Students' grades (I21) |
| Bottom 5 percent of instructors replaced with average instructors (D29) | Average student grade (I21) |
| Individual instructors (A29) | Students' earnings after graduation (J31) |
| Most effective instructors (postdocs) (A29) | Students' grades (I21) |