Do Cooperative-Based Learning Groups Help Students Learn Microeconomics?

Abstract

As many college students voluntarily form cooperative-based learning groups to study course materials, this article investigates whether or not such type of learning improves their academic performance. This is the first research using Taiwan’s higher education data to study cooperative learning in the field of economic education. The data used herein are from 10 intermediate microeconomics courses from 2006 to 2016 at a public university in Taiwan. The sample size is 1,389, which encompasses 120 to 150 enrolled students in each semester. We use an instrumental variables (IVs) approach to remedy the potential endogeneity problem associated with forming cooperative-based learning groups, and the key IV employed is the number of students with the same academic major. The IV estimation results show that forming cooperative-based learning groups does significantly improve college students’ learning outcomes. In addition, the cooperative learning effect is heterogeneous across groups. Students with poor attendance records benefit more from voluntarily formed cooperative learning groups in learning microeconomics. Moreover, it is worth noting that the magnitude of the cooperative learning effect from our analysis is greater than the typical class attendance effect.