Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...