FREQUENCY OF EXAMINATIONS AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT IN A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT

We carry out a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at an Italian University attending an introductory economics class to evaluate the impact on achievement of examination frequency and interim feedback provision. Students in the treated group were allowed to undertake an intermediate exam and were informed about the results obtained, while students in the control group could only take the final exam. It emerges that students undertaking the intermediate exam perform better both in terms of probability of passing the exams and of grades obtained. High ability students appear to benefit more from the treatment. The experiment design allows us to disentangle “workload division or commitment” effects from “feedback provision” effects. We find that the estimated treatment impact is due exclusively to the first effect, while the feedback provision has no positive effect on performance. Finally, the better performance of treated students in targeted examinations seems not to be obtained at the expenses of results earned in other examinations.