Data and Code for: The Effect of Teaching Economics with Classroom Experiments: Estimates from a Within-Subject Experiment

Classroom experiments are a commonly-used teaching tool in economics classes. As their prevalence has grown, more and more services have been created that facilitate classroom experiments. For example, econport.org, games.moblab.com, classex.de, and Charles Holt's veconlab.econ.virginia.edu each offer numerous easy-to-implement online experiments, many of which are designed for use in Microeconomics or Macroeconomics principles classes.<br><br>A large literature studies the impact of classroom experiments on student achievement with experiments that randomize treatment across sections of a course, yielding mixed results. We extend this literature with an experimental design inspired by Wozny, Balser, and Ives (2018), who recommend randomizing treatment across topics within a given course section. Each student is taught some topics using a classroom experiment and other topics without one in a within-subject design. <br><br>We use this design to evaluate the impact of classroom experiments on overall student achievement and separately for male and female students. Avilova and Goldin (2018) show that the degree to which women have been underrepresented among economics majors has been steady for the last 25 years. If classroom experiments boost achievement in introductory classes differentially by gender, they might be used to help address this imbalance by encouraging more women to major in economics. We find our classroom experiments have little overall impact on student learning overall and for both male and female students, but these null results may mask heterogeneous effects across the various experiments used to teach the different topics involved in the study.