Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, which threatens the external validity of the results. In this article, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benefits of recommended practices across a variety of authentic educational contexts—a model we call ManyClasses. The core feature is that researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations. We report the first ManyClasses study, in which we examined how the timing of feedback on class assignments, either immediate or delayed by a few days, affected subsequent performance on class assessments. Across 38 classes, the overall estimate for the effect of feedback timing was 0.002 (95% highest density interval = [−0.05, 0.05]), which indicates that there was no effect of immediate feedback compared with delayed feedback on student learning that generalizes across classes. Furthermore, there were no credibly nonzero effects for 40 preregistered moderators related to class-level and student-level characteristics. Yet our results provide hints that in certain kinds of classes, which were undersampled in the current study, there may be modest advantages for delayed feedback. More broadly, these findings provide insights regarding the feasibility of conducting within-class randomized experiments across a range of naturally occurring learning environments.

In this paper, we explore market reaction to announcements of corporate donations associated with the COVID-19 crisis. Companies with larger firm size, higher leverage, higher institutional ownership, and higher ESG rankings are more likely to donate COVID relief. We observe statistically significant positive abnormal returns over the event window, driven by a subsample of community relief funds. Our results support the notion of a strategic, reputational premium for participating firms. Consistent with signalling theory, we find firms without ESG scores show positive share price responses to corporate benevolence announcements. This finding suggests the market is less likely to anticipate corporate acts of benevolence from firms with missing ESG scores. Our findings suggest that the market positively reacts to corporate philanthropy news during a crisis. The strongest stock market reaction is related to those firms with missing or less favourable ESG scores.

Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single class, threatening the external validity of the results. In this paper, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benefits of recommended practices across a variety of authentic educational contexts – a model we call ManyClasses. The core feature is that researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations. We report the first ManyClasses study, which examined how the timing of feedback on class assignments, either immediate or delayed by a few days, affected subsequent performance on class assessments. Across XX classes, [summarize effect of feedback timing, including key moderators]. More broadly, these findings provide evidence regarding the feasibility of conducting within-class randomized experiments across a range of naturally occurring learning environments.

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