Using Student Response Systems in Economics and Finance Classes

Student response systems (clickers) offer the potential for student engagement and active learning in the classroom. Use of the technology can also help instructors identify areas of uncertainty and use student feedback to customize lectures. Earlier identification of problem areas for both student and instructor should lead to more efficient and effective use of class time and better learning outcomes. This presentation covers best practices in the use of clickers in introductory statistics and principles of managerial finance classes. Topics include how to use clickers, sample exercises, what has worked and what hasn’t worked from personal experience, how to produce clicker exercises, and a review of reports available for tracking results. Participation in this session includes actual involvement in a clicker exercise

Teachers, race and student achievement revisited

Within the education literature, a controversy exists with respect to the issue of matching student and teacher race in an effort to improve student performance. Ehrenberg et al. (1995) finds very little support for this issue, while more recently Dee (2004) finds that there are significant educational gains when students are assigned to an own-race teacher. Dee's result is found after confirming that there was no association between assignment of an own-race teacher and student characteristics, i.e., sorting of students did not transpire. We extend Dee's work by including the effects of student innate ability and teacher gender on student achievement. Our findings indicate that once these two variables are taken into consideration, sorting of students does transpire, and matching students and teachers of similar race has no statistically significant affect on student achievement.

Crime and community heterogeneity: race, ethnicity, and religion

Prior studies have explored the relationship between race and religion and their effect on various crimes. In the USA race is typically defined as the proportion of a community that is African-American or nonwhite. Likewise, religion is defined as the proportion of a community that adheres to any religious denomination. This study extends earlier work by employing Herfindahl indices as measures of community homogeneity with respect to race and ethnicity as well as religious denominations. It also measures religiosity based on four different denominational groups, rather than religiosity as an aggregate. Results indicate that as a community's degree of homogeneity increases, in terms of both race/ethnicity and religion, crime decreases; and that the effects of religion on crime may vary by denomination.

Intra-school competition and student achievement

Within the economics of education literature, numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement. Educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure. While these studies have shown that increases in inter-district competition result in increased student achievement, no studies, to our knowledge, have yet investigated the effect of intra-school competition on student achievement. Within this study, a measure of intra-school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra-school competition leads to increased student achievement.

An investigation of the effect of class size on student academic achievement

Despite the existence of a considerable and current educational literature concerned with the effect of class size on student achievement, the results of attempts to empirically identify the relationship between the variables class size and student achievement are mixed at best. These attempts have typically been hindered, however, by the existence, at least, of one of four factors: (1) the use of a student/teacher ratio as the measure of class size resulting in measurement error; (2) the estimation of a mis-specified model resulting from the failure to control for family effects (i.e., student innate ability); (3) the general failure to take into account the endogeneity of class size with respect to student achievement; and (4) the employment of an incorrect functional form when specifying the relationship between class size and student achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of class size on student achievement, unhindered by the existence of the four factors typically associated with prior attempts. The results of this reinvestigation suggest that the relationship between class size and student achievement is not only non-linear, but non-monotonic.Class size, student achievement, optimality, competition,

Assay Guidance Manual:Quantitative Biology and Pharmacology in Preclinical Drug Discovery

The Assay Guidance Manual (AGM) is an eBook of best practices for the design, development, and implementation of robust assays for early drug discovery. Initiated by pharmaceutical company scientists, the manual provides guidance for designing a testing funnel of assays to identify genuine hits using high-throughput screening (HTS) and advancing them through preclinical development. Combined with a workshop/tutorial component, the overall goal of the AGM is to provide a valuable resource for training translational scientists