Should we trust math preparatory courses? An empirical analysis on the impact of students’ participation and attendance on short- and medium-term effects

Increasing the effect of a remedial mathematics course by switching to an online format during the COVID-19 crisis: evidence from a German university

“…Greefrath et al (2017) confirmed these results at a different university, finding better results of preparatory course attendees in tests at the beginning of the first year (with small effect sizes), again without taking confounding variables into account. Büchele (2020a) found positive short-term effects of attendance of preparatory mathematics courses for economics students on their mathematical competencies when controlling for socio-demographic and pedagogical-psychological variables.…”

“…Therefore, multiple regression analysis (with Stata version 15) was chosen as an identification strategy. Previous studies showed that the given control variables are sufficient to estimate unbiased effects (Büchele, 2020a;Büchele, 2020b). We want to point out that we will just report the upcoming results in section 5, while a deeper discussion of these results is shifted to section 6.…”

“…Furthermore, many of these factors can be considered as confounding variables, determining the mathematics performance as well as the participation in preparatory courses. Previous studies have shown that controlling for these certain variables could lead to causally interpretable treatment effects (Büchele, 2020a;Büchele, 2020b).…”

“…The skill test itself consisted of 26 tasks of secondary mathematics schooling standard (e.g. equations, functions and calculus) and had been used in previous studies (Laging & Voßkamp, 2017;Büchele, 2020a;Büchele, 2020b). Students could score a maximum of 26 points; one point for each task.…”

The Impact of a Mathematics Bridging Intervention on the Inclusivity of a University Economics Programme

“…The few European studies show no greater consensus about the effectiveness of remedial mathematics courses for raising student performance within the study of Economics. While Lagerlöf and Seltzer (2009) and Di Pietro (2014) found little or no effect, De Paola and Scoppa (2014), Laging and Voßkamp (2017), (Büchele 2020a) and (Büchele 2020b) found positive effect from participation in a remedial course. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, there is no European study investigating the key pedagogical issue of what aspects of remedial courses are important in enhancing student achievement.…”