Agenda

Speaker: Shira Fano, University of Venice

Abstract
In this talk we investigate the effects of using a Facebook page exclusively devoted to a first year Mathematics course in a large Italian public university. Posts and discussions supported traditional face-to-face lectures and students could freely post queries and get help from professors and peers. We use a newly constructed dataset to measure how this influences the grade they achieved on the mathematics exam. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to compare the performance of students having access to Facebook with that of a large sample of similar students who were not offered a support page in another branch of the university. We compute difference-in-difference estimates and our main finding is that students who could access online discussions gain on average approximately 1 ad- ditional point out of 30, after controlling for students’ characteristics and robust measures of ability. Moreover, we find that active students, who read and post more often, per-form slightly better than non active ones, who mainly read the content, but the effect is not significant. However, other measures of activity, such as the frequency of visualization of the page significantly increase the probability of earning a passing grade. (Joint work with Paolo Pellizzari)


Bio sketch
Shira Fano joined the Department of Environmental Science, Computer Science and Statistics in September 2016. She is working on a research project aiming to develop statistical models that take advantage of information on social networks, combined with traditional survey data. She obtained a Masters' Degree in Economics in 2010 in Ca' Foscari University of Venice and a PhD in Economics and Finance in Bocconi University in Milan in 2016, under the supervision of Professor Tito Boeri. During her studies she spent a semester in Paris at the Sorbonne. She worked as a consultant for the Statistics Division of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome and as a PhD trainee at the Research Division of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2016 she won a research grant to develop a project on workers' effort and productivity at the National Social Security System (INPS) in Rome.