Although academic ability is the most important explanatory variable in studies of student learning, researchers control for it with a wide array of proxies and combinations thereof. We investigate how the proxy choice affects estimates of undergraduate student learning by testing over 150...

More than three decades of intense interest in and scholarship about the determinants of student learning of economics has led to surprisingly few insights about what a typical faculty member can do differently to increase student academic success. Based on data from a natural experiment, we...