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

Remedial courses, particularly in math, have become indispensable in today's higher education landscape. However, large scale evaluation studies investigating the effectiveness of such courses find mixed results which is only one reason why remedial courses should not be trusted as a functional instrument in general. Besides the unclear impact on students' skills, research mostly does not control properly for the stu- dents' attendance in these courses. This study gives an insight into the differences in students' participation, attendance and the resulting con- sequences for short-, and medium term effects. Therefore, over three periods of time, data on several variables and standardized skill-test outcomes was raised, leading to a sample of N=1,236 students enrolled in subjects of economics to investigate short term effects, while a sub- sample of N=501 students could be matched to measure a medium term effect using a fixed-effects approach.