Daphné Jocelyne Skandalis
Abstract
Testing the effect of a new assignment on student’s interest: Reading and presentating an empirical research article
Do students get more interested in an academic topic, if they have to present a related empirical paper in class? I introduced a new assignment is a Master/PhD class on Labor Economics. Students had to read an empirical research article in groups and make a 5-minutes presentation of the paper when we covered the corresponding theory in class. The primary objective was to make the curriculum appear more concrete and relevant to students. A second objective was to train students’ oral communication skills. To evaluate the effect of the new assignment, I randomly assigned to each student her group, her research article, and the corresponding academic topic. I ran a short survey (about 2 minutes) among all students, both in the first and in the last lecture. The survey answers revealed that the assignment increased students’ interest: students increased their interest in the topic of the assignment more during the semester than in the other topics covered in class. Interestingly, this was even more the case for male students than for female students.