My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on Faculty Feedback Interventions

Scott Carrell at the University of California, Davis conducted a randomized controlled trial on the impact of professor feedback on student success. The study involved a pilot in an introductory microeconomics course and a scale-up across over 43 classrooms and nearly 4,000 students at a large broad-access university. The intervention consisted of strategically-timed emails from professors providing feedback on student standing and keys to success.

Use Cases

• Evaluating the causal impact of faculty feedback on student exam scores based on the experimental design.
• Analyzing differential treatment effects on first-year students from underrepresented minority groups based on the described results.
• Studying the relationship between student perceptions of professors and academic achievement based on the measured outcomes.
• Replicating or extending the experimental methodology for light-touch interventions in other educational settings.

Strengths

• Experimental design provides causal evidence on faculty behavior impacts.
• Scaled-up experiment includes results from nearly 4,000 students across over 43 classrooms.
• Pilot results were replicated to test robustness, showing positive effects on student achievement.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and institutional bias inherent to the two specific universities studied.

Provenance

Source

University of California, Davis

Collection Method

Randomized controlled trial involving professor emails as an intervention.

Geography

United States (comprehensive research university and large broad-access university)