Heterogeneous Students, Impartial Teaching and Optimal Allocation of Teaching Methods.

This paper addresses the issue of identifying optimal mix of teaching methods for an instructor when students are of heterogeneous types. The exact student type cannot be identified ex ante which forces the instructor to act impartially and allocate teaching methods according to some pre-designed plan. In a simple model of instructor-student interaction, we show that if the instructor acts benevolent and impartially towards preparing the initial teaching method plan, there exists a unique optimal mix of teaching methods. We calibrate the impartial teaching model with data on the teaching of Business and Economics related undergraduate and postgraduate units, and find that the characterized optimal teaching method mix differs significantly across different units.