Microeconometric evaluation of undergraduate students’ results a matching methodology application to a portuguese polytechnic
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abstract
During the academic years of 2004/05 and 2005/06 a new teaching
methodology, inspired in the Bologna’s Treaty, was implemented in one of the
nine undergraduate programmes offered by the School of Technology and
Management of Bragança (Portugal). The aim was to increase the positive
results for the students, concerning the acquisition of knowledge and skills.
To expose one undergraduate programme to a treatment – this is the teaching
methodology - without expose the others created the conditions to a process of
microeconometric evaluation that aims to quantify the causal effect of the
exposition to the treatment. Following the lessons of the evaluation literature,
the present paper adopts a propensity score matching methodology choosing as
the interest parameter the average treatment on the treated (ATT). To compare
only what is comparable, the evaluation was carried out on those subjects that
were common among all the undergraduate programmes, like mathematics or
statistics, or subjects that were common among the undergraduate programmes
in the management’s scientific area, like accounting or marketing.
Results show a positive effect of the treatment on those students who had
been exposed to the teaching philosophy in 2004/05. Indeed the treated
students present a bigger percentage of positive results comparing with the non
treated colleagues. However, the results in terms of the grades’ quality are less
obvious. Even if the treated students achieve a positive grade, this grade is
often smaller than the grade achieved by the colleagues. Results for 2005/06
are not so clear.
