An analysis of the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics

This is the accepted version of the following article: Smith, L. C. 2009. An analysis of the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics. South African Journal of Economics. 77(1): 162-178., which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1813-6982.2009.01195.x.This paper analyses the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics on students' performance in the final examination. The data for six cohorts, covering the years 1999 and 2001-2005, are pooled, and the Heckman two-part procedure is used to account for those students who started the course but did not write the final examination. The results suggest that the pedagogic interventions have a positive impact on the performance of academic development students relative to the mainstream cohort and on the performance of mainstream students