A Randomized Controlled Trial of Teaching Methods: Do Classroom Experiments Improve Economic Education in High Schools?

We present results from a field experiments at Swiss high schools in which we compare the effectiveness of teaching methods in economics. We randomly assigned classes into an experimental and a conventional teaching group, or a control group that received no specific instruction. Both of our teaching treatments improve economic understanding considerably while effect sizes are almost identical. However, student ability crucially affects learning outcomes as more able students seem to benefit disproportionately from classroom experiments while weaker students lose out. Supplemental data indicates that our experimental treatment crowded out time for adequately discussing the subject, which may have limited less able students to generate a profound understanding. Furthermore there is no robust impact of economic training on social preferences, measured as both individual behavior in incentivized decisions or political opinions.