Information Cascades in the Classroom: Differing Responses of Men and Women to In-Class Feedback

Abstract

Technology is used in undergraduate courses to engage students and provide feedback about understanding. TopHat is an application which asks students multiple choice questions mid-class. In this field experiment, we determine if displaying or hiding the distribution of peer responses has an impact on learning. When students see peer responses, we find evidence of information cascades on both correct and incorrect answers, but there is no effect on exam grades. The presence of information cascades suggests student performance on TopHat questions may not reflect individual understanding and the class’ responses may provide a distorted measure of comprehension. We find systematic differences between men and women which have implications for teaching.