What do Students Learn from a Classroom Experiment: Not much, Unless they Write a Report on it

What is it about?

There is a growing literature looking at whether participation in interactive classroom experiments helps students better learn economics. The evidence is largely positive. There are, however, almost limitless ways in which classroom experiments can be integrated and used within teaching and so it would seem apt to try and better understand how experiments can be used most effectively. In this paper we report on a natural experiment that showed students learnt significantly more from participating in an experiment when they had to subsequently write a reflective report about that experiment. This would suggest that it may not be enough to just have students participate in an experiment – it is worth also encouraging ex-post reflection on the experiment. The data we have come from an undergraduate course on strategy and games that we teach. During the course all students take part in 10 classroom experiments. At the end of the course students take a test in which there are 10 questions that broadly correspond to the 10 experiments. This provides us with a measure of how much a student learnt on each topic. Crucially, for our purposes, students were randomly assigned two experiments about which they had to write a report looking at the theory behind the experiment and the results from the experiment. By comparing performance on the topics where they wrote an experiment report with those where they did not allows a test of whether writing a report improved performance. We found that students performed significantly better if they had written a report. This result may seem common sense. Even so, the size of effect we observed was very large with student performance increasing by 40-60%. This finding underlines the importance of thinking through how to best realise the potential gains from running a classroom experiment. Just doing an experiment may not be enough. And given that the fixed costs to running an experiment can be substantial this is something worth getting right. We changed the way we teach the module so that students now have to fill in a log book during and after every experiment. This is one way to encourage reflection on the experiment.

Featured Image