Abstract
In an educational environment focused on student learning, class
participation and feedback are key to improving students’ performance.
Class participation grading methods are often unclear and subjective, so
providing feedback on class participation grades is challenging for
lecturers. The Work-In-Class Assessment Tool (WICAT) we designed enables
instructors not only to grade class participation clearly and
objectively but also to provide students with weekly feedback on this
class participation grades. This paper aims to analyze the effect of
WICAT class participation grades and weekly feedback on students’ final
exam performance. We conducted an experiment with 699 accounting
students over the 2016-2019 period. Our results show that students whose
class participation grade was obtained through WICAT performed better on
the final exam. Furthermore, our results suggest that a student assessed
by WICAT was 2.28 times less likely to fail the final exam. However, the
weekly feedback that WICAT allowed seemed not to affect students’
performance. These results have important implications for curriculum
designers and teaching staff on how to design course syllabuses and
where to focus in-class efforts.