Impact of peers on educational outcomes in Economics

INTRODUCTION. This paper contributes to the study of peer interactions in the university classroom. METHOD. We evaluate the effects of teamwork on individual academic performance in four Team Based Learning (TBL) courses in the degrees of Economics and Business Administration. RESULTS. We found that the average grade of the rest of the team members has a significant and positive association with the grade of the individual student. The student's personal test score increases about 0.65 points for every 1-point increase in the average score of their teammates. This association remains positive and significant even when we include socio-demographic variables to control for individual characteristics. We also tested the heterogeneity of peer effects in relation to the ability of individual and team performance. DISCUSSION. The results suggest there is no heterogeneity in individual ability; however, we found a positive or slightly negative difference in the magnitude of the peer effect for teams in the top/bottom quartile compared to teams in the middle of the distribution.