The Effect of Information Technology on Economic Education

The author evaluated the effect on student performance of using a new information technology (IT) enhancement that permits students to participate in the recording of lectures that can be downloaded later from the Internet. The author compared two sections of the same Intermediate Microeconomics class and observed the sample students to be representative; the empirical model accounted for any differences in student characteristics between the comparison and test groups. Model results show that students exposed to the IT enhancement performed about 2 percentage points better on their final exam than did the comparison students; however, the difference was not statistically different from zero. The author concluded that the use of IT appears to not have any substantive influence on student performance.