THE TEACHING ECONOMIST - William A. McEachern 
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Issue 33, Fall 2007
William A. McEachern, Editor
The Grapevine
The Spring 2007 issue of The Teaching Economist looked at whether and how instructors discourage students from arriving late to class. This prompted Lee Spector of Ball State University to send a link to a study in which he and his colleague James McClure looked at student behaviors considered rude or disruptive, including tardiness. They wanted to find out whether "certain well-recognized and easily-observable" behaviors related to test performance in three entry-level economics courses. They sorted "classroom incivilities" into two categories: 1) behaviors disrespectful to the instructor because they suggest disinterest in the class, such as tardiness, sleeping in class, and reading outside material in class; and 2) behaviors disrespectful to classroom decorum but not necessarily to the instructor, such as eating, drinking, and wearing hats in class. Graduate students sat in the back and checked off these behaviors in each class (students were not told about this). The resulting check marks were aggregated for each student into a disinterest index for the disrespectful-to-the-instructor behaviors and a boorishness index for the disrespectful-to-class-decorum behaviors. Attendance was required in these courses. After controlling for some other student characteristics, such as gender, major, and starting GPA, they found that their disinterest index was negatively and significantly related to exam scores: "the behaviors that strongly suggest disinterest in the professor's lectures do seem to adversely affect student performance." The boorishness index didn't seem to matter. The authors speculate that in-class behaviors such as eating, drinking, and wearing hats, are not considered boorish by today's students. See "Behavior and Performance in the Classroom," Educational Research Quarterly, Vol. 27 no.1 (2004): 15-23 at http://web.bsu.edu/cob/econ/research/papers/mcclure2003erq.pdf. I'll add that because attendance was required in these classes, this may have increased the disinterest index. If attendance wasn't required, disinterested students more likely would have stayed away and not annoyed the instructor, at least not with their classroom behavior. You can lead a horse to water...
Also on the subject of student tardiness, Janet Novosad of Southern Illinois University writes that she found the following to be effective in getting students to class on time. On the first day of class, students are told there will be 5 to 10 pop quizzes during the term that will combine for 10% to 15% of the final grade. Each quiz will start exactly when the class is scheduled to begin. The instructor will ask five questions aloud, without repeating any. The quiz takes only about 5 minutes. Late students miss some or all of it. Obviously, there are no make-ups.
Oskar Harmon of the University of Connecticut and James Lambrinos of Union College wanted to learn whether proctoring exams in online courses affects student performance. They compared test results from two online principles of macroeconomics courses that were identical in every respect save one: The final exam was proctored in one class but not in the other. All other exams were not proctored. They estimated a model to predict exam scores based on several student characteristics, such as the student's GPA. The authors reasoned that if cheating is more prevalent during unproctored exams, then the explanatory power of the model for those exams would be lower than for proctored exams. In other words, if cheating occurs during the unproctored exam, variables such as a student's GPA would do a poorer job at predicting a student's performance. In a sense, cheating introduces more noise. They found a significantly higher R-square statistic for the proctored exam, suggesting that cheating occurred when exams were not proctored. "Are Online Exams an Invitation to Cheat?" University of Connecticut Working Paper 2006-08 (Revised February 2007) can be found at http://www.econ.uconn.edu/working/2006-08r.pdf.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, majored in economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. In September, he wrote about how economics has influenced his thinking: "I'm convinced that the study of economics changes brains in a way I can identify after about five minutes of conversation. In particular, I think the study of economics makes you relatively immune to cognitive dissonance... The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems. The joke about economists is that they are always using the phrase 'On the other hand.' Economists are trained to recognize all sides of an argument. That seems like an easy and obvious skill, but in my experience, the general population lacks that skill. Once people take a side, they interpret any argument on the other side as absurd. In other words, they are relatively susceptible to cognitive dissonance." See his blog at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/on-the-other-ha.html.