Large introductory courses may be cost-effective for universities, but present many drawbacks, including student absenteeism, high failure rates, and reduced learning. We undertook a re-design of our Principles of Economics courses in order to improve the learning outcomes for collaborative, dependent, and independent learners, by introducing three changes: mandatory tutorials with active learning activities; consistency in course instructors; and online quizzes. We administered a survey to students before and after the intervention to evaluate the impact of these changes on three learning outcomes: final grades, final exam scores, and self-reported learning. Our results show that the intervention positively impacted all learning outcomes, primarily due to increased tutorial attendance. Encouragingly, the strongest improvement occurred for students at the low end of the grade distribution.

大型入门课程对大学来说可能具有成本效益，但存在许多缺点，包括学生旷课、高失败率和学习减少。我们对经济学原理课程进行了重新设计，以通过引入三个变化来提高协作、依赖和独立学习者的学习成果：强制性教程和主动学习活动；课程讲师的一致性；和在线测验。我们在干预前后对学生进行了一项调查，以评估这些变化对三个学习成果的影响：期末成绩、期末考试成绩和自我报告的学习。我们的结果表明，干预对所有学习成果产生了积极影响，这主要是由于增加了辅导出勤率。令人鼓舞的是，