Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...