Project Investigator(s): Jonathan Graves, Instructor, Vancouver School of Economics
Project Description
This project asks a simple question: what is the impact of office hours on student achievement? Research on the scholarship of higher education has repeatedly emphasized the importance of student-faculty interaction. However, very few of these studies are able to explain whether this is a causal relationship: as an alternative, perhaps better students are also more likely to interact with faculty? This project addresses problem using the method of instrumental variables: by carefully designing a student survey, and exploiting the structure of course scheduling at UBC, we can assess the causal impact of office hours.
Research Questions
The key research questions are: Does student utilization of office hours causally improve their academic performance? What is the difference between the causal impact of office hour utilization and the correlation found in observational studies? Does the differential impact of office hours on minority students have an effect after correcting for the problem of selection in office hour utilization?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
The theoretical contributions of this project occur in several areas. First, it adds to the existing literature on student-faculty interactions, providing estimates of this impact. Second, and more critically, it addresses a major existing gap in the literature by examining this empirically from a causal point of view. This allows additional tertiary contributions, since we can also assess the extent to which existing observational studies are likely impacted by biases introduced by their statistical models. This also allows us to re-examine existing literature suggesting faculty-student interaction is differentially valuable for different groups of students.