Class participation and feedback: a bet on the winning horse?

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.