The Economic Education Network for Experiments

Economic education research has taught us a lot over the years about pedagogy and student learning, but most of what we know comes from studies and experiments run at single institutions in classes usually taught by just one or two instructors. These studies have two big weaknesses: low precision and limited generalizability. We believe we have an opportunity to address both of these and make a big leap forward in research productivity.

Founded in 2023, the Economic Education Network for Experiments (EENE) is a collaboration of economics instructors around the world that cooperate to develop and run synchronized studies in their undergraduate classrooms. We will tackle important research questions, come to agreement about study protocols, implement treatments, collect comparable data, and pool our samples. These pooled samples will be big enough to give us precise estimates, and because we have a wide range of courses, institutions, and students, we will be able to generalize our results. In turn, these results will help us all improve our teaching, increase student learning, address equity issues in our classrooms, and potentially increase diversity in our profession.

Economics instructors are welcome to participate in projects at all levels–They can help develop studies, collect data in their classrooms, analyze data, and/or write up results. We now have over 200 members from a diverse set of institutions including public institutions, private institutions, US R1’s, liberal arts colleges, and HBCU’s.

Our most important event of the year is the EENE Annual Meeting. This hybrid in-person/online gathering brings members together to share progress on active projects, develop new initiatives, and advance early-stage work. The meeting is held immediately after CTREE—the world’s largest economics conference focused on undergraduate education—in the same city, making it easy for members to attend both events.

Feel free to email us with any questions you might have, and please do spread the word to any other economics instructors that you think might be interested.

We hope you will join us!