Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: It is not who you teach, but how you teach

We use unique data from seven intermediate economics courses taught at four R1 institutions to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning. Because the same assessments of course knowledge mastery were administered across semesters, we can cleanly infer the impact of the unanticipated switch to remote teaching in Spring 2020. During the pandemic, total assessment scores declined by 0.2 standard deviations on average. However, we find substantial heterogeneity in learning outcomes across courses. Course instructors were surveyed about their pedagogy practices and our analysis suggests that prior online teaching experience and teaching methods that encouraged active engagement, such as the use of small group activities and projects, played an important role in mitigating this negative effect. In contrast, we find that student characteristics, including gender, race, and first-generation status, had no significant association with the decline in student performance in the pandemic semester.