Effects of prior economic education, native language, and gender on economic knowledge of first-year students in higher education. A comparative study between Germany and the USA

The assessment of university students’ economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students’ economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings are often only available within countries and focus on students who are at different levels of their studies or graduates. To remedy this research deficit, the goal of our article is to analyze the status of economic knowledge of students at the beginning of their course of studies and compare the effects of prior economic education, gender, and native language between the USA and Germany. Therefore, we used a translated and adapted version of the fourth edition of the Council for Economic Education's Test of Understanding in College Economics (TUCE). The TUCE is an international measuring instrument that has been validated and widely been used in several countries to assess the economic knowledge of students in higher education. Since the curricular structure as well as higher education studies/programs in both countries is quite comparable, no tremendous general between-country effect has been expected. But as our results show, if micro- and macroeconomics are analyzed separately, divergent effects on the students’ economic knowledge were detected showing that prior education has a positive significant effect merely on micro test scores, while gender and native language are purely significant on macro test scores in both countries. In our conclusion, we discuss several reasons that might have caused these different effects.