Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993. It is common in the economic fields of labor and development to view education as an input into the production process of individual goods or the economy as a whole. In this dissertation, I look at the process by which education itself is produced. In particular I look at the educational production process which takes place during a one-semester economics course. There is a rich literature already in existence which takes this approach. My contribution to this literature is threefold: I closely examine the theoretical basis for typical model specifications and introduce a new category of variable which I call Noise. Next, I give a critical review of the recent literature in this area. Finally, I explore new input variables in an empirical study of my own. University records and a student survey are used to collect a rich data set. Regression techniques are used to analyze this data. U of I Only Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs