Issue 28, Spring 2005

William A. McEachern, Editor

The Grapevine

Cell phones have become such an annoyance in the classroom that more instructors are restricting use. To see how economists are addressing the problem, I surveyed 60 online syllabi that address cell phone use in class. Here are the restrictions I found, beginning with the loosest: 1) students shouldn't initiate calls, and must take any calls in the hallway; 2) phones must be set on vibrate mode, with any calls taken in the hall; 3) vibrate mode only and emergency calls only; 4) a student expecting an important call must clear it with the instructor before class; 5) all cell phones, pagers, and PDAs must be shut off (as Jeff Bauer of the University of Cincinnati puts it: "Consider this class to be a call-free, beep-free, vibrate mode-free zone of silence"); and 6) a ringing phone will cost you dearly. For example, Teresa Riley of Youngstown State warns: "If your cell phone rings during class, I will subtract 5 points from your final grade for each time that it rings." Some policies aim to elicit the cooperation of other students in enforcing restrictions. For example, Glen Waddell at the University of Oregon notes: "I reserve the right to award points to students assisting me in the control of cell phone usage during lectures." And Burcin Unel of the University of Florida threatens: "If I hear a cell phone ring during class, there will be a pop-quiz given. These quizzes will be in addition to the pop-quizzes I give during the semester." Nothing like a little peer pressure. So far, few syllabi mention text messaging, though that appears to be a growing distraction. According to one college freshman quoted recently in The New York Times, "Everybody does it in class" (1/9/05).

While exploring cell phone policies, I noticed that a surprising number of syllabi no longer list an office phone number or other contact number. Instructors seem to be steering students toward email. But at the other extreme, one instructor lists his cell number on the syllabus. The course in question was principles of microeconomics taught last fall by Don Rudow, a graduate student at the University of Georgia. I asked him how this policy has worked out. He said he received more calls after providing his cell number, but the semester total was still only about one to two calls per 10 students. Most come a day or two before an exam. Students still communicate more by email because they know he won't answer his cell phone if doing research or otherwise engaged. He says providing his cell number makes him feel less guilty if he has to miss office hours. He will continue to provide his cell number in the spring semester, when he teaches 300 students.

Eric Bettinger of Case Western Reserve and Bridget Terry Long of Harvard tried to measure the performance of adjuncts and graduate assistant instructors by tracking 25,000 freshmen in 12 four-year Ohio colleges. They ended up with about 235,000 observations across 21 disciplines, but let's focus on the results for economics, based on about 12,000 observations. Having adjuncts and graduate student instructors teach introductory economics tends to reduce future credit hours taken in economics, but the effect is small and not significant. Adjuncts have a small but statistically significant negative effect on the probability that students will major in economics. This effect is more pronounced for adjuncts under the age of 40. Graduate student instructors increase the likelihood that a student successfully completes future courses in economics (the effect of adjuncts is negative but not statistically significant). Once the age and education of the instructor are accounted for, neither adjuncts nor graduate student instructors have a statistically significant effect on future credit hours taken in economics or the choice of economics as a major. This research appears as "Do College Instructors Matter? The Effects of Adjuncts and Graduate Assistants on Student Interest and Success," NBER Working Paper No. W10370 (March 2004). If you are eligible for a download (most are), the paper can be found at http://papers.nber.org/tmp/44250-w10370.pdf. If not, the download costs $5.

Dennis Coates of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and three colleagues examined learning differences between online and face-to-face instruction in college level principles of economics courses. In a simple framework, they find face-to-face sections averaged 3 to 6 more correct answers (out of 33 possible questions) on the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE) than did online sections. This difference is statistically significant. But they conclude this result is biased because of the self-selection of students into online and face-to-face sections (poorer students tend to choose the online course). After employing an "endogenous switching model," the authors find that students who select online classes perform better than they would have, other things constant, in a face-to-face class. Results are reported in "'No Significant Distance' Between Face-to-Face and Online Instruction," Economics of Education Review (October 2004): 533-46.

Does financial aid affect college retention? Larry Singell of the University of Oregon considered the impact of financial aid on student retention after accounting for student characteristics and unobserved attributes. Overall, his findings suggest that increasing reliance on merit-based aid by governments and universities versus aid based on need has lowered the relative graduation rates of needy students. These results are reported in "Come and Stay a While: Does Financial Aid Effect Retention Conditioned on Enrollment at a Large Public University?" Economics of Education Review (October 2004): 459-71.

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