We use cookies to provide you with the best possible website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as cookies used for anonymous statistics, comfort settings, or displaying personalized content. You can decide which categories you want to allow. Please note that depending on your settings, some features of the website may not be available.

Cookie settings

These necessary cookies are required to enable the core functionality of the website. Opting out of these cookies is not possible.

cb-enable
This cookie stores the user's cookie consent status for the current domain. Expiry: 1 year.
laravel_session
Stores the session ID to recognize the user when the page reloads and to restore their login session. Expiry: 2 hours.
XSRF-TOKEN
Provides CSRF protection for forms. Expiry: 2 hours.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 15031
January 2022
Online Teaching, Procrastination and Students’ Achievement: Evidence from COVID-19 Induced Remote Learning

published in: Economics of Education Review, 2023, 94, 102378.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and universities to transit from traditional class-based teaching to online learning. This paper investigates the impact produced by this shift on students' performance. We use administrative data of four cohorts of students enrolled in an Italian University and adopt a difference-in-differences strategy exploiting the fact that the transition to online teaching has taken place at the beginning of the second semester, while classes were face-to-face in the first semester. We compare students' performance in the second semester of 2020 with their performance in the first semester and contrast this difference with the difference between second and first semester in the previous academic years. Controlling for a number of variables proxying for COVID-19 incidence and internet connections' quality, we find that online teaching has reduced students' performance of about 1.4 credits per semester (0.11 Standard Deviations). Freshmen are those who suffer more, while almost no negative effect is found for Master's Degree students. Since the need for self-discipline in an online environment could cause students' low achievements, we study the role of procrastination and show that online teaching has been particularly detrimental for students affected by present-bias problems.

Kommunikation
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Netzwerkkoordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

Das IZA@LISER-Netzwerk ist eine weltweite Gemeinschaft für exzellente Forschung in der Arbeitsmarktökonomie und angrenzenden Fachgebieten. Nach dem Wechsel von Bonn wird das Netzwerk nun am Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) koordiniert.

Über das IZA@LISER Network
Contact
IZA Network (Current Site Operator):

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
11, Porte des Sciences
Maison des Sciences Humaines
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval, Luxembourg

IZA Institute (In Liquidation):

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH i. L.
Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, 53113 Bonn. Germany
Phone: +49 228 3894-0 | Fax: +49 228 3894-510
E-Mail: info@iza.org | Web: www.iza.org
Represented by: Martin T. Clemens (Liquidator)