Do Teaching Practices Matter for Cooperation?

This paper evaluates the impact of a student-centered teaching pedagogy program by a local education authority on cooperative behaviors of 610 students in five middle schools. We measure changes of students’ cooperation with lab-in-the-field experiments, implemented before and after the program. Relying on a classroom-level fixed effect strategy, we show that the program has a positive effect on cooperation in a linear public goods experiment by way of remediating a negative time trend of contribution. Our findings support the idea that teaching practices stimulating interpersonal interaction affect the formation of cooperative norms among students.