A look back at Summer 2025

September 11, 2025

As much as we love teaching at the Econ Ed Lab, it’s nice to be able to focus 100% on research during our summers. This summer we brought several new members into the lab, pushed forward some old projects, and started a few new ones.

Nexus Scholars Milo and Eirdeena helped us revise our first paper studying the long-term retention of skills in our introductory and intermediate microeconomics courses, and conducted the analysis for a follow-up paper that looks closely at the roles of pedagogy and skill types. The new results are fascinating; e.g., Active learning seems to improve retention of the most difficult concepts relative to traditional lecturing.

Ashley, Kevin, and Luca, another set of Nexus Scholars, set up a tremendous amount of data that we’ve collected over the past eight years to comprehensively estimate the impact of Cornell’s Active Learning Initiative in Economics on a variety of student outcomes. It turns out the devil really is in the details as each of the eight transformed courses has its own story. At the same time, there definitely some common lessons.

Elena and Julia helped set up data collected for the EENE AI project in the sprin, and started combining the Cornell survey data with local assessment data to see how student use of GenAI in courses predicts learning.