A new paper in Economica, “Another way of teaching microeconomics: impact evaluation of the CORE project”, collected data from three cohorts (2021–2023), some 6,000 students in total, and combines administrative academic records with a follow-up survey on students’ study habits and perceptions to assess the impact of teaching with CORE compared to traditional economics textbooks. We caught up with two of the authors, Pablo Blanchard and Elisa Failache, both Assistant Professors at the Instituto de Economía at Universidad de la República, to hear how it came about and what they found.
Hi Elisa and Pablo, thanks for joining us. Could you start by telling us how the study came about? Why did you decide to assess the impact of CORE?
Pablo: CORE was proposed at our university in 2019. Elisa and I were not directly involved in the initial discussion that led to the reform, which was implemented in 2020. At that point, the proposal generated some debate, because some teachers believed that moving away from a traditional textbook could weaken students’ training. An intermediate solution was adopted: to run a pilot, with about 30% of students assigned to the new CORE-based course and the rest to the traditional course.
In that context, randomly assigning students to each course was a sensible idea, because these were first-year students of economics. Letting them choose between two alternative curricula made little sense because they were just entering the university and had no real basis on which to choose.
I taught the CORE course in 2020, in its first edition. The team to evaluate the course was formed in 2021. The idea was to bring together instructors from both the traditional course and the CORE course, as well as researchers who were not teaching either course, such as Elisa and Juan Camilo Cárdenas.
Why was it important to include researchers who weren’t teaching?
Elisa: I was doing my PhD outside Uruguay and came back in 2022, working in the research institute at the university. As part of that work, I use techniques in impact evaluation, so I joined the team on the analysis side. We also thought it was a good idea to have people from outside the course itself for the sake of impartiality.
How big was the study, and how were the two groups split?
Pablo: It was about 30% of the students in the CORE course and 70% in the traditional one. Across the three cohorts we used, 2021 to 2023, that comes to about 6,000 students in total.
Elisa: Each year in Uruguay we have around 5,000 students entering the university. The university is public, free and has no entrance restrictions, so a lot of people start older. In the analysis we restricted the sample to students under 25 years of age, because we wanted to analyse the effects on those who were more aligned with the typical first-year student around the world. We also had students from different cohorts, surveyed at different points in time. For some of them, they had taken the course the previous semester; for others, it was one or two years before. We did some iteration analysis to understand if there were differences across these groups, and our main results were still present.
The study draws on a very large sample over three academic years, that’s pretty robust data.
Pablo: It’s important to mention that we have two sets of results. One set is related to academic performance and outcomes, and for that we use administrative records from the university. That’s where the figure of around 6,000 students comes from. The other set is from the survey, where we have approximately 500 responses, focused more on students’ perceptions of the course and their study habits.
How was the survey implemented? Was it done in class or in the students’ own time?
Pablo: It was implemented through the platform that students already use to download materials for their classes, so it was completely online, and not during class time, just whenever they had time to do it.
Elisa: The response rates were good in comparison with what is usual in this kind of research. It was not particularly low.
Let’s talk about the results. On the academic side, you found that students taught with CORE were doing just as well as those taught with the traditional course, there was no disadvantage. How important was that finding for you?
Elisa: We have two kinds of academic results. One is performance in the introductory microeconomics course itself, and there we didn’t find any difference, students were doing equally well in both.
The other concern was about future, more advanced courses. The more advanced micro courses at our university are taught in a way that is closer to the traditional approach, more associated with the standard framework. One worry was that teaching introductory students in a different way could leave CORE students less prepared for those advanced courses. For us, it was a very important result that this was not the case. Learning in another way, more related to reality, not so focused on maths, did not hurt students in their future advanced courses. You could argue that we are not just evaluating the textbook, we are combining both the content and a change in how we think it is useful to teach, and in how students engage with courses.
That aligns with other research on CORE. A study from Australia that found students taught with CORE actually went on to perform better in all subjects. Beyond academic performance, what did you find on the side of students’ experience?
Pablo: If we stop at the results related to academic outcomes, our conclusion is that the CORE course is as good as the traditional course. But for us, the outcomes related to the academic experience of students were really important.
Perhaps the most encouraging result was that students assigned to CORE were significantly more likely to say the course contributed to their academic and professional development. The difference is about 18%, and the result is significant both for students who go on to continue with an economics degree and for those who continue with a non-economics degree. This finding is really important for us because it implies that CORE successfully achieves one of its main goals: making economics education more engaging and stimulating in the early years.
A second result is that students assigned to CORE were around 60% less likely to rely on private tutoring outside the university. This may be more specific to our context. In Uruguay, a lot of students pay for private tutoring outside the university, but a decrease in that demand is good news for our institution.
The third result is that they were more likely to attend classes and study in groups. So those are the main results related to academic experience and study habits.
An interesting feature of the study is that you didn’t survey students right at the end of the course — you went back to them later.
Pablo: We conducted the survey between six months and three years after students finished the course. So the CORE methodologies generated lasting impacts beyond the course itself, which is an encouraging result for us.
Something that comes up in conversations with employers about the future of work, especially in the age of AI, is the importance of soft skills: working in teams, working in groups. Your finding that CORE students are persistently more likely to study in groups is interesting in that context.
Pablo: Yes. We also ran this pilot during the pandemic, and the pandemic contributed to a sense of isolation for students. Trying to generate networks as a way to break that isolation is something really good, and we need to think about our teaching in that way.
Reflecting on the results, what is it about CORE that you think these students liked so much?
Pablo: One of the main things is the intention to connect economic theory with historical facts and with the real problems of our time. This is valid for any country, but more so for countries like ours, where we have high rates of unemployment and high inequality. The traditional micro courses are quite disconnected from the real problems our students face. I think that’s the main reason.
Elisa: I agree that’s a very important point. Our reality, as in many countries, is often more distant from the typical “pure” economic setting than in other places, so the connection to real problems matters a lot.
The pedagogical approach is also relevant. Economics is a social science, and it involves human beings in all its fields of study. We think it’s important to train students to think about their subject of study as people, not only as numbers or abstract rationalisations without any context in their lives. I’m not teaching either of the courses, but you see students mentioning that in CORE classes they were playing games, using materials in class, being asked to talk and think. Something about that pedagogical approach also helps explain why students like it more, or why they felt it was very valuable to take the course.
Pablo: We see our universities and our research as a community, and we want the same for students. CORE’s approach generates more engagement and, at the end of the day, improves our students’ experience.
Pablo, Elisa, thank you so much. It was great talking to you, and we’re really grateful for the work you and your colleagues have done in assessing CORE.
Reference: Araya, F., Blanchard, P., Cárdenas, J. C., Failache, E. and Perazzo, I. (2026). ‘Another way of teaching microeconomics: impact evaluation of the CORE project’, Economica, pp. 1–44.
The full paper is available in Economica: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecca.70045.
Browse all research on CORE: https://www.core-econ.org/research-on-core/
For more on Pablo’s and Elisa’s work, visit their websites:
Pablo Blanchard: https://sites.google.com/view/pabloblanchard/home
Elisa Failache: https://sites.google.com/view/elisafailache
Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecca.70045
