Learning Scores and Economics Instruction

Abstract

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.