SIER Working Paper Series

122 Do Teaching Practices Matter for Cooperation?

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of a student-centered teaching pedagogy program on cooperative behaviors of 610 students in five middle schools. We combine the school- level program of changing teaching practice with laboratory experiments, implemented before and after the program, measuring changes of students’ cooperation. We show that the program increased students’ voluntary contributions in a linear public goods experiment and raised teamwork performance in a real-effort task where members pursue a common interest. Our findings support the idea that teaching practices stimulating interpersonal interaction among students affect the formation of cooperative norms among students.
Keywords: teaching practices, project-based learning, cooperation, field experiment, laboratory experiments
JEL classification: C91; C92; C93; I21