Reply: Does Downloading PowerPoint Slides Before the Lecture Lead to Better Student Achievement?

Abstract

This reply responds to a comment by Cannon (2011) that opens the debate on consistency of the effect of downloading PowerPoint slides before lectures on students’ exam performance. Cannon (2011) points out potential endogeneity problems in Chen and Lin (2008) and attempts to explore the unconditional mean effect of downloading PowerPoint slides for the full sample. In this reply, we firstly argue that the estimates in our original article are consistent since the effect of interest is the “conditional” treatment effect but not the unconditional mean effect. We provide explanations for our rationale of estimating the “conditional” treatment effect. Secondly, we propose a modified downloading variable to replicate Cannon’s analysis. Our results suggest that downloading PowerPoint slides before the exam does not produce a significant effect on absent students’ exam performance which is different from the results in Cannon (2011). Our analysis does support Cannon’s argument that students fixed effects are different across different attendance status.