Journal article
Students are almost as effective as professors in university teaching
J Feld, N Salamanca, U Zölitz
Economics of Education Review | Elsevier | Published : 2019
Abstract
In a previous paper, we have shown that academic rank is largely unrelated to tutorial teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we further explore the effectiveness of the lowest-ranked instructors: students. We confirm that students are almost as effective as senior instructors, and we produce results informative on the effects of expanding the use of student instructors. We conclude that hiring moderately more student instructors would not harm students, but exclusively using them will likely negatively affect student outcomes. Given how inexpensive student instructors are, however, such a policy might still be worth it.
Grants
Awarded by Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
Funding Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Luke Chu, Alexandra de Gendre, Ingo Isphording, Julie Moschion, Cain Polidano, Chris Ryan, Derek Stemple, Barbara Wolfe and Jeffrey Yusof for helpful comments. We thank Sophia Wagner for providing outstanding research assistance. This research was partly supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (project number CE140100027). The Centre is administered by the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland, with nodes at The University of Western Australia, The University of Melbourne, and The University of Sydney.