IS ONLINE EDUCATION WORKING?

—原载美国《国家经济研究署》公报2021年7月号—

<National Bureau of Economic Research>, July 2021

【摘要】当下这场流行病再次引发了关于在线教学与面对面教学对学生成绩的影响的长期争论。本文的目标是使用来自公立大学的丰富的、成绩单级别的纵向数据，提供关于在线与面对面教学对学生学习成果的影响的新证据。我们特别注意通过将学生和教师的固定效应纳入实证分析以及将在线教育与面对面教育的影响与COVID-19相关的混杂因素区分开来来消除选择偏差。我们的结果表明，面对面课程的学生在成绩、退出课程的倾向以及获得及格成绩的可能性方面表现优于在线课程。然而，我们的调查还表明，特定于教师的因素，例如对评分的宽容或防止违反学术诚信的行为，在确定所研究的关系方面发挥着重要作用。如果不考虑这些特定于教师的因素，这种关系就会严重偏向，导致人们错误地得出结论，在线教学比面对面教学更适合学生学习。我们的分析进一步记录了与COVID-19引发的学生评估政策变化相关的成绩上升，大学以及教师采用更灵活的评分方法。虽然这些发展导致所有学生的整体成绩提高，但那些在2020年春季开始面授课程的人似乎从中受益更多。最后，一项辅助分析表明，居住在宽带技术更好的社区与在COVID-19期间不得不从面对面教学转向在线教学的学生的成绩提高有关。这一发现支持了这样一种论点，即在大流行期间，获取技术的不平等可能导致学习差距加深。

[Abstract] The pandemic has revived the longstanding debate about the effect of online versus face-to-face instruction on student achievement. The goal of this paper is to provide new evidence on the impact of online versus face-to-face instruction on student learning outcomes, using rich, transcript-level longitudinal data from a public university. We pay particular attention to eliminating selection bias by incorporating student and instructor fixed effects into the empirical analysis as well as to separate out the impact of online versus in-person education from COVID-19-related confounding factors. Our results indicate that students in face-to-face courses perform better than their online counterparts with respect to their grades, the propensity to withdraw from the course, and the likelihood of receiving a passing grade. However, our investigation also reveals that instructor-specific factors, such as leniencyin grading or actions towards preventing violations of academic integrity, playa significant role in determining the studied relationship. Without accounting for these instructor-specific factors, the relationship is severely biased, causing one to mistakenly conclude that online instruction is better for student learning than face-to-face instruction. Our analysis further documents a rise in grades associated with COVID-19-triggered changes to student assessment policies embraced by universities as well as instructors adopting amore flexible approach to grading. While these developments led to an increase in grades for all students overall, those who began Spring 2020 in face-to-face courses appear to have benefitted more generously from them. Finally, an auxiliary analysis shows that living in neighborhoods with better broadband technology is associated with a larger increase in grades among students who had to switch from in-person to online instruction during COVID-19. This finding supports the argument that unequal access to technology might have caused learning disparities to get deepened during the pandemic.

这篇中文解析是针对论文《在线教育真的有效吗？》（Is Online Education Working?）的解析。该论文于2021年7月发表于美国《国家经济发展署》公报（NBER Working Paper）上。该研究作者包括美国奥本大学的DuhaTore Altindag, 南密西西比大学的ElifS. Filiz和美利坚大学的ErdalTekin。

（中文解析的全文见《华人心理健康报》2021年10月21日PDF版）

论文原文：Altindag, D. T. ,Filiz, E. S. , & Tekin, E. . (2021). Is Online Education Working? NBER Working Paper. No. w29113. http://www.nber.org/papers/w29113.

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