Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

For those attending the ASSA meetings in Atlanta, I tried to find all the teaching-related sessions. If I missed any, please let me know... Jan. 3, 10:15 am, Atlanta Marriott Marquis, A703 Research in Economic Education Presiding: William Greene (New York University) Achievement Goals, Locus of Control, and Academic Success and Effort in Introductory and Intermediate Microeconomics Lester Hadsell (State University of New York-Oneonta) The Effectiveness of Peer Tutoring on Student Achievement at the University Level Vincent G. Munley (Lehigh University) Eoghan Garvey (National University of Ireland, Galway) Michael J. McConnell (Economic Research Service/USDA) Do Online Homework Tools Improve Student Results in Microeconomics Principles Courses? William Lee (St. Mary's College of California) Richard Courtney (St. Mary's College of California) Steven J. Balassi (St. Mary's College of California) The Efficacy of Collaborative Learning Recitation Sessions...

Happy Thanksgiving to all! In between cooking, eating, football and moaning about how full you are, if you happen to sit down at your computer, here are a few things I read recently that you might find interesting... Tim Harford suggests that gift cards might not solve the problem of the deadweight loss of Christmas presents. If you brave the crowds on Black Friday, this post about price discrimination will give you something to think about while you're in line (hat tip to Mark Thoma ). Alex Tabarrok describes a fun activity for illustrating gains from trade. I'll add that you can do this in a large class if you use a subset of students - I've done this with a group of 10-15 students at the front of the 500-seater (once the other students see that the activity involves candy, there tends to be a lot more students who want to volunteer). Rob Pitingolo has one of the clearer explanations of why popcorn is so expensive at the movies that I've ever seen. If you send a...

In my Economics for Teachers class, the last third of the semester is being spent with the class doing group presentations. Each group was assigned a broad topic (e.g., fiscal policy, exchange rates, etc.) and must write a lesson plan and then 'teach' the lesson to the class. As I watch the presentations, I repeatedly see the students explain things in ways that are much more complicated than they need to be, while neglecting to mention things that would make the concepts clearer for their classmates. For example, the group presenting on exchange rates yesterday explained currency appreciation and depreciation without ever pointing out that when one currency appreciates, the other currency must depreciate. Part of the problem is that the students do not, themselves, have the strongest grasp on the material but it's also that it takes time (and teaching a topic repeatedly) for teachers to learn where the points of confusion are likely to be for their students and then how to...

Academics complain a lot. Actually, I don't know that academics complain more than people in other occupations but maybe it just seems to me like we complain a lot, considering most of us purport to love our jobs. So in honor in November being the month of giving thanks, I thought I'd take a minute to list a few things that I really do love about my job... Students who tell me that they really enjoy my class and/or ask if I teach any other classes they can take (and when this is in my 500-seater, they know I have no idea who they are) Students who tell me they decided to become an econ major after taking my class Students who say the things to their classmates, when those classmates are being boneheads, that I wish I could say but obviously can't (like when someone asks the same question for the fifth time and someone else gives the answer with a 'Geez, dude, she said that, like, four times already') Students who actually say my name correctly Having students rec...

It isn't often that I talk about macro but I had just finished reading a lesson plan on fiscal policy from students in my Econ for Teachers class when I saw this post from tutor2u about this chart: This struck me as a great way to introduce the topic of fiscal policy, as it makes a strong visual statement about the many policy tools that a country could use. I can imagine a great discussion about what would lead different countries to rely on different combinations of tools.

Many readers of this blog are familiar with the AEA's Teaching Innovations Program (TIP). Although the original grant for that program is coming to a close, many of the folks who brought us TIP are hoping to continue their work. Part of that will be in the form of an on-line site, known as Starting Point , designed to provide wider access to information about innovative pedagogies in economics. One of the evaluators for the project recently sent a message to the tch-econ mailing list, asking for participants in a survey about what people are currently doing in their undergraduate econ classrooms, and I offered to pass on the link to readers here: ...I am interested in learning about how economists become aware of alternative teaching methods and their experience with them. Would you please invest 5 minutes of your time to answer a brief survey? The results will be useful for those working on the Starting Point project... Just click on the URL below to access the survey. Feel...

Mankiw has a blog map to complement his textbook. As the author himself explains : Go to the blog map and click on the chapter you are teaching. The blog map will give you a list of recent blog posts related to the material in that chapter. If that is not enough for you, click on "Archived Posts" and you will get even more. You can use this resources to find recent examples in the news to help spark class discussion.

I'm trying something new this semester (again). Throughout the semester, I am giving my students 'optional' assignments - optional in the sense that they don't have to do every single one but they do have to do two over the course of the semester. I'm calling them 'Choose-Your-Own Assignments' or CYOs. I have no idea if my students get the reference or not (I'm a little bit afraid to ask) but I like it. Anyway, each assignment is a short essay, usually asking students to come up with an example that is relevant to something we are discussing in class. For example, the first one was "Describe a situation where you or someone else said, “I have no choice.” Explain why you felt you had no choice. Then identify all the possible alternatives – what else could you have done? These do not have to be alternatives that you would actually have ever chosen but please be as complete as possible." Now that we're into demand, the most recent one was ...

Most every other blog related to economics is talking this morning about the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics going to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their work in institutional economics. But since I know nothing about these folks, that's about all I'm going to say about that. Instead, I want to take a moment to write about something that is slightly off-topic for this blog, though not entirely, since it does have to do with the quality of education, at least in California. Last night was the deadline for Governor Schwarzenegger to act on the hundreds of bills that were sitting on his desk; he had been threatening a blanket veto if legislators didn't strike a deal on water reform but apparently, he blinked on that one. Instead, he signed or vetoed a bunch last night , including a veto on AB 8 . AB 8 was introduced by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D - Santa Monica) and would have created a working group to structure a comprehensive overhaul of California...

For me, the biggest challenge of using clickers is coming up with good questions. I have never liked multiple-choice questions, partly because as a student, I always thought multiple-choice was WAY easier than open-ended. This is largely because, for many questions, it is really hard to come up with good 'wrong' answers. When I started teaching the 500-seater, I took a lot of questions from test banks but always felt I needed to change something so they wouldn't be so easy. But it's often been hard for me to tell ahead of time which questions would be good for peer instruction, i.e., that would generate a mixed distribution of answers the first time asked. Over time, I've used the answer distribution on exam questions to find these questions; that is, if a high percentage of students answer a question incorrectly on an exam, I think it's safe to assume I'll get a similar (or worse) distribution if I ask it as a clicker question in class the next semester (o...

I'm on furlough today - my first furlough day on a teaching day. For any non-Californians reading this, the CSU faculty are required to take 9 furlough days each semester this year; unlike faculty in the University of California system, we are allowed to schedule ours on days when we teach (i.e., we can cancel classes), though we were still required to get approval of our furlough schedule from our department chairs. After a lot of agonizing, I decided to take three of my nine days on teaching days and I scheduled them on the days prior to the three midterms in my Principles class. That might sound odd, since this would presumably be when my students would most need me around but I have always used the class meeting before an exam to do an in-class review session; I figured that by canceling those, students would need to do more work on their own but I wouldn't actually have to cut anything from the curriculum of the course. Unfortunately, since I scheduled my furlough days ar...

I've been waffling about joining the gym at school - I used to belong, let my membership lapse when I went on sabbatical, and haven't re-started it, though I am incredibly out of shape. I keep saying, "I really need to get back in shape" so recently a friend asked, "Why don't you just bite the bullet and join the gym? Then you'll have extra motivation to go since you'll already be paying for it." I laughed and explained that unfortunately, this is one of those times when I think too much like an economist - most people would think as my friend does, that paying the monthly fee would give me an additional incentive to go, but as an economist, I think about the fact that once I've paid the monthly membership fee, it's a sunk cost. Whether I actually go use the gym or not, the fee will be charged to my credit card, so simply paying the fee will have no impact on my decision to go to the gym on any given day. The marginal cost of going to t...

Considering how much time I spend talking in front of large groups of people, you would think that I would eventually stop being nervous about it. And for the most part, I am way more comfortable than I used to be; for example, I no longer rehearse my conference presentations word-for-word in front of the hotel mirror the morning of my session (well, not word-for-word anyway). But I'm still waiting for the semester when I don't feel really, really nervous before my first class meetings (and I'm talking 'think I need to go throw up' nervous). And it's not just because I have 500 students - I get this way before my smaller classes too. The thing is, I know that as soon as I walk in and start talking, I'll be fine; it's not like I'm imagining some disaster that I won't be able to handle, or I think the students will totally hate me. But knowing that I'll be fine doesn't seem to diminish how nervous I am beforehand. I suppose, in some ways,...

- Greg Mankiw is teaching a freshman seminar this fall and shares his reading list here .* - J.D. on Get Rich Slowly has a really nice overview of federal taxes , including showing historical marginal and average tax rates, an international comparison of tax burdens, and how much we pay per billion dollars of government spending (along with useful links for the source data for all that). - That last point, about how much we pay, is from the guy who does the death and taxes poster, which I had heard about but never actually seen. It's pretty amazing, showing "...over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2010 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year." - And this one isn't really about teaching economics but I can't understand why more people aren't talking about the 'public option' that exi...

NPR's Marketplace has had a feature this past week where they have talked to economists about some lighter topics. A couple might be interesting to principles students, particularly Justin Wolfers talking about the opportunity costs of exercise and Betsey Stevenson talking about searching for a mate. Friday's segment with Paul Kedrosky is a good example of how economists think (and how we can't really turn off that mode of thinking, even when we're doing pretty mundane stuff).

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers and podcasts . Most economics professors have, by now, heard of Aplia but for anyone who hasn't, it is a company founded by Paul Romer that basically provides online assignments. They work with several publishers and if you use a textbook they partner with, you can get problem sets customized to that text and an online version of the book. The first semester I used Aplia, I assigned several of the problem sets that corresponded to the Mankiw text I use. Students tended to hate them, I think largely because I did not edit the questions carefully enough, to make them match what I do in class and the questions I ask on exams (I don't use the publisher-provided test bank). In subsequent semesters, I have assigned fewer problem sets, and...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers . One of the challenges for faculty who want to make their classes more interactive is that these activities generally take more time than simply lecturing on the same material. I absolutely believe that using clickers and other in-class activities lead students to a deeper understanding of ideas, and I have always taken more of a 'depth over breadth' approach anyway. Still, when I started using clickers, I knew that I would have to make some adjustments and cover even less material. One way I have made time in class is that I have stopped using class time for basic definitions. Instead, I require that students listen to short podcasts (no more than five minutes) that I record using Audacity , a freeware sound editor. The podcasts give...

This is a follow-up to my previous post about how I use clickers in the 500-seat Micro Principles class. Although I do not have direct evidence of how clickers impact student learning, I have survey responses to several questions about clickers (SDSU’s Instructional Technology Services provides a survey that they ask all clicker-using faculty to administer at the end of each semester). Responses to these questions suggest that students believe clickers help them learn and make them feel more involved: Class clicker usage helps me to remember important course content: 80.6% strongly or somewhat agree; 7.3% strongly or somewhat disagree Class clicker usage helps me focus on course content I should study outside of class: 70.9% strongly or somewhat agree; 9.7% strongly or somewhat disagree Class clicker usage makes me more likely to attend class: 85% strongly or somewhat agree; 5.3% strongly or somewhat disagree Class clicker usage helps me to feel more involved in class: 83.5% strongly ...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. Over the next several days, I'll be posting about how I use clickers, Aplia and podcasts . I use clickers from eInstruction ; San Diego State decided a few years ago to standardize with one company across campus and I think it was a really good move (more information about clicker use at SDSU, including faculty and student feedback, and links to research on their effectiveness, can be found here ). As more and more faculty have adopted clickers, it has become easier for me to explain them to my students and to justify their cost. I embed clicker questions in the PowerPoint slides using eInstruction’s PowerPoint plug-in so the transition to questions is seamless during lectures. My policy is to make every class worth the same number of points (last semester, it was 3 points; previous ...

The UK's Intute has created what looks like an incredibly useful tool for students, called Internet for Economics . It's a tutorial on how to use the internet to do research in economics. What I really like about it is that aside from just providing links to useful econ sites, it discusses the difference between academic sources that may be available online (e.g., through a library database or Google Scholar) and other sources that may turn up in a Google search, and how students should evaluate whether a source is appropriate for their research. For anyone teaching a research class (or simply assigning research papers), I would imagine this would be a great resource. [Hat tip to Economics in Action ]

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p...

The Teaching Professor suggests that they can and we should : Can students accurately assess their work? Most of us would say no with some conviction. But could they accurately evaluate their work under conditions that separated the grade they’d like to receive from the one they think their work deserves? A study in Great Britain found that they could. Even more surprising, the 160 students in this sample were first semester college students. The researcher asked them to estimate their grade on completed work using a 100 percentage point scale and 60 percent of them were within 10 percent of the grade given by the teacher. Equally surprising was the fact that when students were not within 10 percent, under-evaluation occurred more often than over-evaluation. Almost 60 percent under estimated their grade. ...However, other research has shown that students are quite mystified as to the purpose behind teachers’ requests to self assess. They don’t understand why the teacher who has complet...

A few weeks ago, I posted a tweet and facebook status that said, "Dear non-academics: "Must be nice to have summers off" is equivalent to calling me lazy and not doing my job. Please refrain. Thanks." Every summer, I get those comments about having time 'off' and every summer, I try not to be annoyed by them. It's not that I don't understand where the perception comes from but as I've been telling my friends and family for years, having flexibility about when and where I work is not the same thing as not working. But this summer, I have to admit that part of my defensiveness is driven by guilt because I'm NOT working as hard as I have in the past (and no, it's not because I have tenure). I'm just burnt out. I feel like, by the end of the school year, teaching the 500-seater plus two entirely new courses had sucked up all the energy and creativity I had, not to mention pretty much every ounce of patience. When the semester ended, I ha...

At the TIP workshop , one of the first activities was for us to discuss what we consider the most important thing professors can do to facilitate student learning (which we then had to demonstrate through some sort of presentation but that's a whole 'nother story). In my group, we started out with an interesting discussion about whether 'being organized' is the most important thing a professor can do to facilitate student learning. I argued that there are certain things that are sort of a baseline for student learning - to me, being organized and knowing what you're talking about are prerequisites for stepping into any classroom. And I do think that if you aren't organized, students won't be able to learn. But I think of being organized as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for student learning. Plenty of people deliver content in an organized way; that does not mean students will learn. My group agreed on 'making material relevant' as the id...

Hat tip to Jim Julius, SDSU's fabulous Associate Director of ITS, for a pointer to this article on Engaging Milliennial Learners. Anyone truly interested in reaching our students needs to go read it but I'll warn you that you may not be happy about it. Here's what the author found when she asked Millennials about the characteristics of their ideal professor and ideal learning environment: Millennials feel that the ideal professor should be: 5. "Energetic," "enthusiastic," and "upbeat" with a "positive attitude." I know upon reading the student quotes above, some of you may suddenly feel nauseous. Or perhaps, like me, the very thought of students desiring me to be "upbeat" drains my energy. The audacity of it all!!! 4. "Open-minded" and "flexible." Unfortunately, students are not using the term "flexible" in the physical "Pilates" sense, as they desire flexibility in assignments,...

Today might be one and only time in my life that I will be able to say this: I did something that was more 'thinking like an economist' than Steven Levitt! On the Freakonomics blog this morning , Levitt wrote about how he and his family dealt with a problem with their cat. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem involved doing several different things, any one of which might be the true solution. Since some of the things involve substantial cost (like kitty Prozac - I kid you not, go read it!), it would be good to know what was the real key so they could stop the other things. Levitt uses this as a lesson in the benefits of experimentation. He's basically advocating putting 'ceteris paribus' (all else equal) into action - i.e., keeping everything the same while you change one thing at a time, so you can isolate what works and what doesn't (and I assume this is how they will eventually figure out what they can subtract from their cat's regimen). So the ...

When I discuss taxes and equity, I teach my students about the benefits principle of tax equity (i.e., who pays the tax should correspond to who receives the benefits) and discuss this as one rationale for why we have a progressive income tax system. But students always have a hard time grasping the possibility that "rich" people benefit from government as much as "poor" people. This attitude is also contributing to California's budget difficulties since Republicans are insisting that the budget gap must be closed entirely with spending cuts - I can only assume that those who support this position are seriously underestimating the benefits they personally receive from government services. So I LOVED this editorial from the Sac Bee that points out the many ways that not-poor people benefit from state spending. I'll be using it next semester as the starting point for our discussion of progressive taxes: The largest portion of the state's general fund budg...

The emails about final grades have almost stopped, I got the revisions done on an R&R that needed finishing before my co-author disappears for the summer, and I just got back from the AEA's Teaching Innovations Program (TIP) workshop in Santa Fe so I'm re-energized and looking forward to really starting my summer. For those who aren't familiar with it, TIP began five years ago and "seeks to improve undergraduate education in economics by offering instructors an opportunity to expand their teaching skills and participate in the scholarship of teaching and learning." Phase 1 is the workshop where there are sessions on interactive learning techniques. Participants can also go on to Phase 2, which involves actually implementing some of those techniques into classes, with mentoring and assistance from the TIP staff. And Phase 3 gives participants an opportunity to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Unfortunately, this is the last year of the origi...

Andrew Leigh has a nice article about the wisdom of assuming taxpayers are perfectly informed. He summarizes some recent studies that show many taxpayers are not, in fact, very well informed about how the tax code works and Leigh points out that this has important implications for anyone talking about tax policy. I was particularly struck by this passage: For this experiment, [the authors] exploited the fact that product prices in the US do not include sales taxes. Working with a grocery store, they posted tax-inclusive prices on a series of randomly selected products, and watched to see how it affected consumer behaviour. When surveyed, consumers typically knew that tax would be applied at the checkout – yet posting a tax-inclusive price on the shelf still reduced demand by 8 percent. Like hundreds of econ professors across the country, I emphasize to my students that statutory incidence (who the government collects the tax from) has no bearing on economic incidence (who really pays...

It's April 15th, which means a lot of people will be complaining today about how much they pay in taxes. I know that no one likes paying taxes but whenever people complain about paying 'too much', I always wonder how much they would be willing to voluntarily pay for all the benefits they receive from the government. I've been thinking about this a lot because I was recently repeating to a friend my little tirade about my students not knowing what government does. He pointed out that a lot of people (especially, it seems, Republicans) are not aware of all the things that government does - sure, if you ask someone to think about it, they can probably come up with big services like police and military protection or public schools, but a lot of things that the government does are not that obvious to the average person, or at least, it's not obvious how it affects them directly. As a policy economist, I believe that one of the most important roles for economists is to ...

Greg Delemeester uses a blog to post an Econ Bonus Question of the Week for his classes. You need to be one of his students to get the extra points for answering but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't benefit from the great questions he comes up with. Since I've just finished covering asymmetric information in my Principles class, I'll be posting a link for my students to his most recent post which asks: Suppose that a company offers "grade insurance" that works as follows: For each course in which you get a grade below a C, the insurance company pays you $500. Before offering the insurance policy for sale, the insurance company looks over the transcripts of university students and finds that on average 10% of all grades are below a C. Explain why the insurance company would be incorrect in assuming that it would only have to pay claims on about 10% of its policies. What is the implication of your analysis for the optimal premium (i.e., price) the compa...

If you were asked to list all the ways that government (any level) touches your life, how hard would it be for you to come up with at least a few examples? Not hard, right? You probably drove on public roads today, maybe while listening to NPR on the radio; you probably ate something that was approved at some level by the FDA or ate in a restaurant inspected by a county health inspector; maybe you dropped your kids off at a public school or bought something that required paying sales tax or pulled over to get out of the way of a speeding police car. Not hard, right? Certainly, a bunch of students sitting in a classroom at a state university should be able to come up with a long (or even short!) list of things the government does, right? I'm sure you can guess where I'm going with this... That's right: apparently, the answer is no, 300 students sitting in a state-subsidized classroom have no idea what the government does or how it might affect their lives. After mentioning...

A student asked me this a few weeks ago, and I was reminded of it again when reading a recent Freakonomics post in which Levitt points out that there are several economists among the 203 finalists for Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People: As I write this, my friend Roland Fryer is ranked 38th. Ben Bernanke is at 133, Tim Geithner is at 152 (does he count as an economist?), Nouriel Roubini is at 161, Paul Krugman is at 168, Nate Silver is at 181 (not an economist, but close enough), and Richard Thaler is at 184. I'm guessing that a lot of people read that and thought, "what does he mean 'does Tim Geithner count as an economist'? Isn't Geithner the Treasury Secretary, the one who is basically 'in charge' of the economy?" Well, yes, and given that some economists don't think Geithner is doing such a great job, it could be that Levitt is making a somewhat sarcastic swipe at Geithner's abilities as an economist. But it...

I've been MIA the last few weeks while getting a paper done for a conference and largely just trying to keep my head above water with classes. But spring break is this week and I'm hoping to catch up a bit. One of the great ironies of academic life is that we have all this flexibility so non-academics often look at our schedules and may envy all the vacation and 'free time' that we get. But the reality is that to be a successful academic, you have to have the self-discipline to manage all that 'free time', and many academics I know work many more hours than people with more typical 9-to-5 jobs. It's also a job that's really hard to 'leave at the office', so even when I'm not technically working, I'm often thinking about work-related stuff. All of which is to say, I'm very bad at taking vacations. If I don't have specific things planned, I tend to default into doing work. This is not necessarily a bad thing - I see it as an indica...

I gave my first midterm of the semester in the 500-seater yesterday. Every semester, I beg, plead, admonish, threaten and cajole my students to a) use the right scantron form and b) fill it out correctly. Since there are four versions of the exam, that means they must fill in the bubble for their version (A, B, C, or D), as well as bubble in their 9-digit ID number. If either of those is missing, the machine that reads the forms will stop and I either have to manually type in their ID (since many students will write the number but just not fill in the bubbles) or skip their form entirely because without a version letter, I don't know which key to use. That leads to many students coming to my office later, to ask why they got such a low score and I end up manually grading their scantron, once they figure out which version of the test they took. I have considered telling students that I won't do this, that if they get a zero on the multiple-choice part because they screwed up, th...

[Warning: this is a bit longer and more of a rant than my usual posts but there's also quite a bit of real economics here] For the last several days, I have been reading about California's budget mess with increasing horror. I honestly cannot understand what is going on with the Senate Republicans (Note: my frustration is really aimed at Senate Republicans because they are the ones holding up the budget process. From what I've heard, Assembly Republicans are ready to sign off if the Senate does). I have quipped on both Facebook and Twitter that my Econ 102 students understand California's budget situation better than the Senate Republicans and while I was partly sarcastically expressing my frustration, the more I've thought about it, the more I'm wondering if it's true. Last week, my class learned about Production Possibility Frontiers and I used the state budget as my example. Specifically, the 2008-09 budget started out, at some distant point last summer, ...