The Impact of Digitalization on Student Academic Performance in Higher Education: Investigating the change in academic performance of university level students after a sudden switch to digital education due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Case of Jönköping International Business School.
2020 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
As in any other sector, the Covid-19 outbreak has caused many changes in education, and there is a reasonable expectation for this intervention to have a significant impact on the students and their performance. The purpose of this study was to analyse the effects of the digital semester, imposed on students due to Covid-19 outbreak, on student academic success. Using a quasi-experimental methodological approach called dif-in-dif analysis, three empirical models were constructed to analyse if there is an overall effect when comparing our control and treatment groups, as well as if there were any group-specific differences when it comes to the performance across genders and educational levels. The study found a significant negative effect of the digital semester on student academic success, suggesting that students performed significantly worse after the Covid-19 outbreak caused the University to step away from face-to-face teaching and adapt to remote studies. Furthermore, it was found that gender-specific differences do not affect the academic performance of our treatment group; however, female students performed worse when the digital semester was implemented compared to the control group who had both the classes and exams face-to-face. Lastly, Master students were found to perform significantly worse compared to Bachelor students’ when the Covid-19 outbreak caused the education to transfer to the digital environment.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020. , p. 41
Keywords [en]
Undergraduate Education, Quantitative Study, Field Experiment, Treatment Effect Model, Covid-19, Home-education
National Category
Social Sciences Economics and Business Economics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-50437ISRN: JU-IHH-NAA-1-20200215OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-50437DiVA, id: diva2:1462498
External cooperation
Jönköping University
Supervisors
Examiners
2020-09-072020-08-302025-10-13Bibliographically approved