Lei Tang
PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Toronto
150 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G7
Email: lei.tang@mail.utoronto.ca
Research Interests
Education Economics
Applied Econometrics
Experimental Economics
Teaching Interests
Econometrics
Microeconomics
Education Economics
Job Market Paper
Who Benefits from Frequent Grading of Class Participation?
In universities, class attendance is known to improve learning, yet many students skip classes.
Can instructors help students improve by frequently marking class participation?
If yes, who benefits the most?
Moreover, will the students who would benefit from frequent marking choose it when they are given the choice,
and can universities impose frequent marking on a large scale without increases in costs?
To answer these important questions, I conducted an eight-month field experiment in large second-year classes
at a major Canadian university. Specifically, the experiment first allows students to express their preferences
for marking frequencies relating to their class participation – whether class participation is assessed every week
(frequent marking) or every other week (infrequent marking). The students are then randomly assigned to
the frequent and infrequent marking schemes. Findings indicate that (1) imposing frequent marking on
class participation improves students’ performances on average if they were assigned to the frequent marking scheme;
(2) the frequent marking helped the performance of low-ability and low self-control students the most;
(3) when students were given the choice between the frequent and infrequent marking schemes,
the ones who would benefit the most were no more likely to choose the frequent marking scheme than others,
indicating they may be unaware of their problems or did not want to overcome them.
These results support the use of a compulsory frequent assessment for class participation.
Alongside the benefits, the costs of imposing frequent marking can be minimized by using classroom
technologies that allow instructors to collect and mark students’ responses electronically.
Papers in progress
Does Grade Incentives for
Class Participation Improve Academic Performance in Large Classroom?
Absenteeism is common in higher
education despite the important role of class attendance in academic success. Previous
randomized field experiments find that mandatory attendance policy have little
or no effect on absenteeism. This study investigates (1) whether providing
grade incentives for class participation would help students, especially
low-motivation students, to show up and actively participate in class
questions, and (2) whether participating in the incentivized class improve exam
grades more than the un-incentivized class. An eight-month field experiment in
university classrooms shows that the answers to (1) and (2) are mixed and the
effects are heterogeneous.
Heterogeneity in Belief
Updating among Middle School, High School and University Students
A bandit problem is a dynamic
decision-making task that represents a broad class of real world problems in
which alternatives to be chosen are of uncertain reward rates or types. This study
conducted an experiment on two-armed bandit problems among 460 middle school,
high school and university students in China. The study investigates whether
subjects use Bayesian rule in belief updating when making decisions under
uncertainty. If not, how do they deviate from it? The study also tries to
relate the deviations to observable characteristics, namely, education level
and gender.