Active Learning Initiative

Overview

The Active Learning Initiative (ALI) is a Cornell program that supports departments as they redesign undergraduate courses to include substantial active learning. Between 2017 and 2023, the ALI team in Economics transformed eight core undergraduate courses by developing polling questions, small group activities, in-class experiments, and semester-long projects. At the same time, the department developed a suite of standard assessments that were fielded before and after course transformation.

In this project, we pool all the data that was collected during the ALI to comprehensively measure its impact on a variety of student outcomes. We are also collecting new data from the transformed courses to assess the persistence of the program’s effects.