A random effects model for the impact of remote teaching on university students’ performance

The COVID-19 pandemic had a relevant impact in all aspects of the social life. In Italy, in March 2020 schools and universities suspended the activities in presence and suddenly moved to remote teaching. In this contribution we aim at analysing the effects of remote teaching on university students’ careers. To this end, we consider the differences in gained credits by the freshmen cohorts of academic years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020, enrolled in two bachelor degree courses (Business Administration and Psychology) at the University of Florence. Indeed, both cohorts regularly attended courses during the first semester, while only freshmen from academic year 2019/2020 experimented remote teaching during the second semester. As outcome, we consider the proportion of gained credits in the semester over the expected credits, thus the data have a panel structure with two observations per student. We estimate the impact of remote teaching through a random effects linear model. As a main result of our preliminary analysis, we detect a significant and negative effect of remote teaching on the career progressions of academic students.