Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their great book Academically Adrift have taken data from a respectable indicator of critical thinking and problem solving skills, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, as well as the NationalSurvey of Student Engagement and have concluded, roughly, that typically students neither work very hard nor learn very much.
The research, based on the US-wide National Education Longitudinal Survey, found that a teacher's gender had "large effects on student test performance".