Seminar attendance, lecture capture, and disability adjustments: intuition and evidence

In this paper we report the outcome of an exercise in which we tested several pedagogical beliefs in regards to student performance that had become important for our practice. The first was the idea that in-person attendance leads to better exam performance than non-attendance and/or reliance on recorded lectures. The second (and quite separate) query was to explore the effectiveness of strategies designed to “level the playing field†for students facing disadvantages. The final belief was that formative coursework was associated with improved exam performance for all students, particularly the weakest ones. We thus regressed the exam performance of students in a taught postgraduate Business Economics course on a range of factors, including seminar attendance, use of online lecture recordings, participation in Disability Access Plans, performance on a formative assessment task, and a range of standard control variables. Our results suggest that seminar attendance was positively associated with superior performance on the final exam. We also found that moderate or complementary use of lecture recordings was beneficial for student performance, while large-scale use had no significant positive or negative impact. We further found an absence of any statistically significant difference in the performance of students with Disability Access Plans relative to other students, suggesting that measures to enhance equity for students are effective.