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This study explains how economics instructors can incorporate pretest and posttest assessments into their economics courses to make testing and related teaching more dynamic and interactive with students. Such assessments allow the correct and incorrect responses to pretest and posttest items to be used by instructors to create four learning scores that reveal different pathways of student learning—positive, retained, negative, and zero. Learning scores provide more insights into learning progression among students during an instructional unit or a course than is possible with the typical posttest only assessment. The study explains how learning scores can be used by economics instructors to analyze classroom or group learning, to diagnose individual student understandings or misunderstandings, and assess how each test item contributes to student learning. It discusses the practical applications and extensions of learning score analysis that make it realistic for economics instructors to use and addresses measurement concerns. JEL Codes: A2, A22

This study describes the implementation of a curricular tool designed for students to develop civic engagement through running a social business in one fifth-grade classroom. The One Hen unit focuses on teaching elementary students the concept of social entrepreneurship through a project where students run their own social business to address a community need. This study has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how elementary students learn economics to increase civic engagement as the One Hen unit could lead to students' becoming more aware of problems in their community and to gain experience planning for civic action.

"lthough many millions of dollars are spent each year on introductory economics instruction in American colleg-es and universities, the return on this investment has been disturbingly low. Studies have shown, for example, that several months after having taken a principles of economics course, former students are no better able to answer simple economics questions than others who never even took the course. Most students, it seems, leave our introductory courses without having learned even the most important basic economic principles."

Teaching Innovations in Economics presents findings from the Teaching Innovations Program (TIP) funded by the National Science Foundation. The six-year project engaged economics professors in the use of interactive teaching in undergraduate economics courses. Each chapter offers an insightful explanation of an innovative teaching strategy and provides a description and examples of its effective use in undergraduate economics courses. The book's conclusion assesses the results from an evaluation of the program that reports detailed findings on how TIP fundamentals have contributed to faculty development and successful outcomes. -- The first three chapters of the book describe the results of TIP's three phases: (1) workshops on teaching for college and university economics instructors that introduced them to a variety of interactive teaching strategies; (2) follow-on instructional modules that provided mentoring from interactive strategy experts and gave participants an opportunity to adapt and apply these strategies to their undergraduate economics courses; and (3) opportunities to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning in economics, which involves sharing and discussing teaching innovations with other faculty members in presentations, papers, and other forums. The chapters following describe the seven interactive strategies featured in the project: cooperative learning, classroom experiments, interpretive discussion, formative assessment, context-rich problem solving, teaching with cases, and active learning in large-enrollment courses. These seven chapters were each written by a team of four economists, consisting of a strategy expert and three TIP participants who used the teaching strategy in their classrooms with students.

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of Supplemental Instruction, a formal review/lab session program developed at the University of Missouri, designed to improve student learning in courses that have typically exhibited poor student performance. Using a two-equation model and student transcript data readily available to instructors and academic researchers, we evaluate the effectiveness of the program in economics principles. The analysis explicitly considers the confounding factor of self-selection in program participation. We find that ordinary least squares significantly underestimates the positive impact of Supplemental Instruction. The results suggest that formal programs designed to increase the intensity of instruction can have a demonstrable payoff in the form of increased student learning.