Publications

This paper investigates the academic mindset of economics students across eight countries using a large-scale dataset collected through the Economic Education Network for Experiments (EENE) in 2023/24 and 2024/25. Surveys from 1,188 students and 14 instructors across 18 modules at 11 universities outside the United States measured four dimensions of academic mindset—belonging, self-efficacy, growth mindset, and perceived relevance—at the start and end of a teaching term. We find that students’ mindsets are dynamic and context-dependent rather than uniformly improving over time. While perceptions of belonging within economics and the discipline’s relevance tended to increase, general self-efficacy and beliefs about the accessibility of economics declined during the academic term. Gender consistently emerged as an important source of heterogeneity: non-male students reported lower self-efficacy and weaker perceived relevance of economics, with several gaps remaining evident by term’s end. Pedagogical context was also associated with outcomes: active learning environments and intermediate-level courses were often linked to stronger mindset measures, while larger institutions and later academic years were sometimes associated with weaker outcomes. Cross-national variation was substantial. These results highlight that student self-efficacy and identity with economics are associated not only with individual characteristics but also with pedagogical practice and institutional context. The findings point to the potential value of inclusive, interactive teaching and culturally sensitive approaches to support diverse participation in economics education worldwide.

Understanding relevance, belonging, and growth mindset (RBG) has become a focal point in economics education for improving diversity. Previous literature suggests students from underrepresented groups have lower RBG (Bayer et al. 2020) and improving RBG leads to higher academic success (Broda et al. 2018). Before developing interventions to improve RBG and persistence in economics, it is important to understand which students are most at-risk of having low RBG. This paper proposes an aggregate measure of academic mindset including elements of RBG and investigates how students' demographic characteristics predict their initial academic mindset when entering an economics course. This paper also investigates determinants of an economics-specific mindset index. The sample consists of 3,212 students, 45 courses, 35 instructors, and 24 U.S. institutions and finds that students who identify as male tend to have higher academic mindset scores than those who do not identify as male, and this result seems driven by economics-specific attitudes. First generation college students (FGCS) also exhibit a lower initial academic mindset. The probability that non-male and FGCS students have a lower initial mindset is larger in introductory courses relative to upper-level courses. Future research should consider targeting these groups for interventions.

Math skills are strong predictors of success in economics courses, yet we know little about what kind of support works best for students with weaker quantitative preparation. This study estimates treatment-on-the-treated and intent-to-treat effects of two one-credit support courses offered alongside a large introductory microeconomics course at an R1 university. One support course emphasized early-semester development of core math skills, while the other focused on guided economics problem-solving. The math-focused course substantially improved performance on standardized math and microeconomics assessments, while the problem-solving course improved only microeconomics understanding. These results demonstrate the value of targeted, concurrent support for vulnerable students.

Economic education research has taught us a considerable amount about pedagogy and student learning, but much of what we know comes from studies and experiments run at single institutions in classes taught by just one or two instructors. As a result, educators must contend with two major drawbacks in most studies: low statistical precision and limited generalizability. Multi-site coordinated experiments are a way forward in pushing the boundaries of knowledge in education and pedagogy, but such studies encounter recruitment and coordination challenges. The authors of this article discuss the Economic Education Network for Experiments (EENE), a new organization dedicated to overcoming these challenges and building a sustainable and thriving community of economic education researchers from around the world working on large-scale collaborative projects.

The vast majority of research on student learning is based on assessments of student knowledge given during or at the end of an academic term. Until now, we have known very little about what knowledge students retain after a course is over or what determines how much they retain. In this paper, we analyze data collected from students who took one of six courses in introductory or intermediate microeconomics. All students in these courses took a low-stakes standard assessment of their learning at the end of the term. At follow-ups, one to 2.5 years later, these students were surveyed about their academic and job-related activities, and given the same assessment they took at the end of the course. We find that some demographic characteristics and prior preparation for the course are strong predictors of how much students retain while initial attitudes toward economics are not. We also find evidence that for some students, application of economic skills in subsequent jobs and courses helps students retain course skills.

The AEA/ASSA 2025 Annual Meetings hosted a session “A Fresh Look at the Future of the Intermediate Microeconomics Course,” extended in this issue as a symposium, offering papers covering the state of intermediate microeconomics courses (Hoyt, Marshall, O'Sullivan, Patel, & Underwood, 2025) and crossing from the discussion of modernizing what we teach (Halliday & Mamunuru, 2025) to how we teach it (Jacobson & Viceisza, 2025). In this paper, I offer some thoughts on how these projects viewed together may offer a starting point for the discussion of how intermediate microeconomics courses might need to evolve and where there is a need for more educational research to light the path ahead.

While the field of economics is lacking in diversity, there is little consensus on the underlying causes of or most effective solutions to this problem. We combine data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) with data from our own survey of U.S. economics departments to identify characteristics of institutions and departments that are associated with observed variation in gender and racial diversity of undergraduate students across departments. We focus our attention on student support, role modeling, course content, and the use of active learning pedagogy. While we find no significant associations between course content or student support with student diversity, we find that gender diversity in departmental faculty is a strong predictor, and that active learning is positively associated with gender diversity.

A large literature has shown that novices and experts across the STEM disciplines differ markedly in how they approach and solve problems. Many STEM education scholars find that giving students scaffolded exercises in which they work with a visualization tool can be highly effective in teaching novices to think more like experts. Using model visualization software developed for EconGraphs, we have created three custom collections of interactive exercises for use in microeconomics courses at three institutions, two in the US and one in the UK. Based on surveys of the students (n=71, 167, and 57 respectively at the three institutions), students found the new exercises helpful. Additional analysis at two of the institutions suggests that the exercises were more likely to be valued by students with weaker math skills, students with weaker introductory microeconomics skills, and, in some cases, students who agreed that economics was interesting and applicable to their daily lives. The contributions of this paper are to illustrate how the free content from EconGraphs and the associated authoring tools may be used to create exercises that enhance the teaching and learning experience at a range of institutions; to provide the exercises themselves as a public good; and to invite further innovation and investigation in this area.

In this paper, we document the design, development, and validation of a new multiple-choice assessment created to test student knowledge and understanding of probability and statistics concepts used in economics. High quality measures of student skills and understanding are useful for course and program evaluation, analysis of pedagogical innovation, and identifying misconceptions and gaps in students’ prerequisite knowledge in more advanced courses. Alternatives such as final examinations often do not provide the desired coverage and are difficult to compare across terms and institutions, and student evaluations of teaching (SETs) may reflect student sentiment rather than the quality of instruction and overall student learning. Until now, the only standard assessment appropriate for undergraduate economics courses was the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE), which tests introductory economics knowledge.

Standard assessments can give instructors reliable objective measures of student skills at the beginning and end of a term. We describe seven standard assessments that we have developed for commonly taught economics courses, and introduce a new website, econ-assessments.org, that allows instructors worldwide to set up any of our assessments for their students. Instructors get a link to their chosen assessment that can be shared with students, and students take the timed assessment when they follow the link. At the end of the test-taking period, instructors receive a report that summarizes performance in aggregate and by learning goal.

In this paper, we document gender and race/ethnic achievement gaps over four semesters of an intermediate-level economics course. We find that, on average, under-represented minority (URM) students score lower on assessments, and this racial achievement gap differs in important ways for male and female students. Male URM students earned lower final exam scores than male non-URM students, but this gap disappears when we control for differences in prior preparation. In contrast, female URM students performed significantly worse than female non-URM students, even after controlling for prior preparation. We also analyze scores on low-stakes assessments and surveys about study behavior and find that the theory of stereotype threat most consistently explains our results. As these issues are unlikely to be unique to our classroom, we offer several potential pedagogical approaches found in the literature to address the differences in prior preparation and stereotype threat that underlie observed achievement gaps.

We use unique data from seven intermediate economics courses taught at four R1 institutions to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning. Because the same assessments of course knowledge mastery were administered across semesters, we can cleanly infer the impact of the unanticipated switch to remote teaching in Spring 2020. During the pandemic, total assessment scores declined by 0.2 standard deviations on average. However, we find substantial heterogeneity in learning outcomes across courses. Course instructors were surveyed about their pedagogy practices and our analysis suggests that prior online teaching experience and teaching methods that encouraged active engagement, such as the use of small group activities and projects, played an important role in mitigating this negative effect. In contrast, we find that student characteristics, including gender, race, and first-generation status, had no significant association with the decline in student performance in the pandemic semester.

Math skills are critical for success in economics courses. However, instructors often lack information about the level and extent of their students' underpreparedness in mathematics. In this paper, we describe the development of two new assessments of math skills relevant for introductory and intermediate economics courses. The assessments may be used early in the semester to evaluate students and identify those with weak math skills. With data from introductory and intermediate microeconomics courses, we employ two different methodologies, a simple threshold analysis and a more sophisticated LASSO logit approach, to illustrate how our assessments identify students at risk of underperforming.

An invention activity is a teaching technique that involves giving students a difficult substantive problem that cannot be readily solved with any methods they have already learned. The work of Dan Schwartz and colleagues (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998; Schwartz & Martin, 2004), suggests that such activities prepare students to learn the “expert’s solution” better than starting with a lecture on that solution. In this paper, we present six new invention activities appropriate for a college econometrics course. We describe how we introduce each activity, guide students as they work, and wrap up the activity with a short lecture.

In this article, the author describes the use of primary literature readings in an upper-division undergraduate field course. One of the two main learning goals of the course was to teach students how to read academic articles in economics with a critical eye. This was accomplished by providing students with a structured framework for summarizing the main methods and results of each paper and feedback provided on short written reports and during in-class discussion activities. Based on his experiences in this course, the author offers observations and suggestions to instructors wishing to integrate non-textbook academic readings in their teaching.