In 2015, I co-presented at the CSU symposium on the topic of student resilience – we suggested the benefits of dovetailing academic work with students’ histories and interests. Since then, I have honed in on additional strategies that seem to motivate student engagement: radical transparency, discussion-based classes, and exploration of contemporary case studies. In tandem, I have reduced the use of practices that seem to discourage students’ intrinsic motivations for learning. Some are fairly straight ahead (don’t read long PowerPoint presentations). Others are perhaps more controversial (don’t take attendance or give exams, be flexible regarding due dates, assign more long-form journalism and podcasts rather than traditional scholarship). Of course, I always ask students to reflect on what works and what doesn’t at the end of a given semester. But I wanted to expand the pool of respondents and ask a set of focused questions. So, to assess whether students believe specific pedagogical approaches are engaging, I created an open-ended survey that asks five questions about: attendance policies, participation policies, assignments, and positive and negative teaching practices. The anonymous survey was sent out to all 301 Humanities & Communication majors at CSUMB in November 2023, and this study shares the findings.

COVID-19 closures provided opportunities for changes in course delivery and modes of student engagement. This paper documents the changes in these instructor practices and their effect on student success. We find a 25% drop in failure rates in the post-COVID period attributable to increased engaged instructional practices, using a fixed effects econometric estimation of grade outcomes and course-specific assessments over time. Certain course-related attributes were found to be significant contributors to student success. Thus, this study contributes to the growing body of evidence of student performance in higher education before and during COVID-19 as well as the impact of modified instructor practices in remote teaching on student success in principles of Economics courses.