Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Although I did not give final exams this fall semester, I also didn't have time to comment on a couple articles about profs who don't give finals because I was busy grading final papers . So you can imagine my reaction to Dan Hamermesh complaining about " lazy academics ", saying that his colleagues were imposing a negative externality on him by not having finals (since it led many of his students to request taking his exam early because they wanted to leave town). While I can sympathize with his complaints about the emails, his assumption that his colleagues were lazy struck me as bizarre. Many of the comments on that post rightfully pointed out that in many courses, final exams are a pretty poor way to assess whether students actually learned anything and papers or projects are much better (and the fact that Hamermesh has 520 students is probably a way bigger problem than his colleagues not giving final exams). Dean Dad had a slightly different complaint, noting...

If I missed any, please let me know... Jan 07, 2011 8:00 am , Sheraton, Director's Row H American Economic Association K-12 Economic and Financial Literacy Education (A2) Presiding: Richard MacDonald (St. Cloud State University) Teacher and Student Characteristics as Determinants of Success in High School Economics Classes Jody Hoff  (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) Jane Lopus (California State University-East Bay) Rob Valletta (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) [Download Preview] It Takes a Village: Determinants of the Efficacy of Financial Literacy Education for Elementary and Middle School Students Weiwei Chen (University of Memphis) Julie Heath (University of Memphis) Economics Understanding of Albanian High School Students: Student and Teacher Effects and Specific Concept Knowledge Dolore Bushati (University of Kansas) Barbara Phipps (University of Kansas) Lecture and Tutorial Attendance and Student Performance in t...

May your grading be done, may your inbox be devoid of student pleas, may the deadweight loss of your presents be small, and may your holiday season be filled with much laughter and joy...

A few different people pointed me to a (not so) recent article in The Chronicle, written by a man who writes for a custom essay company (that is, he writes papers for students). It's a fascinating article - every academic definitely should read it. But while the author's story alone is scary/sad/infuriating, I found many of the comments equally fascinating. As you might expect, there's lots of debate about how to avoid/detect plagiarism and who is to blame for the existence of these essay services. One comment, #253 from thodekke, particularly caught my attention. He writes: "Speaking as an undergraduate student who has to write in many of his classes, I'm confident in saying that I'm much more knowledgable than my writing sometimes suggests. There are those who simply can't articulate thoughts on paper. When given an oral question, they can  answer it and it sounds like a doctorate level thesis. Ask them to write a paper on it and they start sounding lik...

A student comes to a young professor's office hours. She glances down the hall, closes his door, and kneels pleadingly. "I would do anything to pass this exam." She leans closer to him, flips back her hair, gazes meaningfully into his eyes. "I mean," she whispers, "I would do anything." He returns her gaze. "Anything?" "Anything." His voice turns to a whisper. "Would you... study?" [In the FAQ for my classes on Blackboard, I have the following: " If you REALLY want to know what you can do to improve your grade, click here ." Cracks me up every time I see it...]

Speaking of having students set some criteria , I've also been thinking about having students set some of the class rules (that I would typically set down for them). I was originally thinking about this in the context of my writing class, having students decide things like what the penalty would be for late assignments (and what constitutes 'late'), etc. But then I heard about the Cornell instructor who got upset when a student yawned super-loud in one of his classes. While I can see why people think he over-reacted, I am completely sympathetic - whenever this has happened to me, I have been sorely tempted to stop class and make a sarcastic comment to the yawner. I mean, it's just so freakin' rude ! [Note: I'm not talking about just simple yawning here (though personally, I was taught that if you're going to yawn while someone is talking, you at least cover your mouth and try not to be obvious about it). Visually obvious I can live with; it's the on...

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about next semester (yeah, I've got issues...). Since this is my first semester teaching the data class, or using TBL, of course I have a list of stuff that I want to change next time around. What I was thinking about this morning was how to create the groups. This fall, I created the teams by asking students for some basic information and then I just tried to make sure each team had a good mix of students (i.e., mix of good and not-so-good grades, gender, econ versus business interests, etc.). For the most part, it's worked out well but I'm wondering if there's a better way. In my Econ for Teachers class , they have group projects (but not semester-long teams) and I did an exercise where I asked students to brainstorm what characteristics they would want in their group members. Their responses boiled down to four main factors: subject knowledge (this is a course of mostly social science majors with a handful of econ ma...

A bunch of econ blogs have been talking about an interactive graphic puzzle on the New York Times website where you can 'fix the budget' by choosing which programs to cut and which taxes to raise. The options include some of the most recent policy proposals (and some that are totally outside the realm of political possibility). One thing that is cool about the list, particularly for those less familiar with these policies, is that you can easily see the relative contribution of each policy to the deficit. I just wanted to make sure econ teachers are aware of two other budget simulations, both of which are updated regularly so are likely more useful for teachers than the NYT site (though at the moment, neither is quite as timely as the NYT policy options). My favorite is Budget Hero from American Public Media, partly because the graphics are fun :-) but also because it starts out by asking you to specifically decide on general policy priorities before you get into spending a...

I've been using clickers for several semesters now and I can't imagine teaching without them. But one drawback has always been that I can only ask multiple-choice questions. When I teach 500 students, I don't see any other option (at least for things where students' answers will count toward their grade in some way). But this semester, I have had a few application exercises in the data class where I wanted groups to come up with short responses to open-ended questions. I have thirteen teams in one section and ten in the other so grading their responses is not a big deal but I had to figure out how to collect them. One of the tenets of TBL applications is that teams should report simultaneously - easy enough with responses to multiple-choice questions (either with clickers or cards) but more difficult with longer responses. I ended up using Poll Everywhere , a very cool site that allows anyone to create a multiple-choice or open-ended poll and people can respond via ...

I have 135 students across two sections of my Data Analysis class, and 40 students in my other class, Economics for Teachers. This weekend, I graded a set of short (2-4 page) papers from the Econ for Teachers class and it took me about five hours, total, spread over a couple days - I have a basic rubric and I do not make very extensive comments because I feel like I simply don't have time, plus the papers were fairly straightforward and the writing was generally fine. Tomorrow, I will get a bunch of 3-4 page papers from my data students and I expect those to be much more difficult to grade, both because the content is more complex and the students generally don't know how to write like economists. So I'm sitting here doing the math and anticipating it will take me somewhere on the order of twenty hours (that's hopefully). And because of the other stuff I need to get done (mostly class prep), and the fact that I just can't grade for more than a few hours at a time, r...

My sister is about to have a baby so I've been having lots of conversations with friends about the births of their kids, and my mom friends all agree that the brain simply doesn't remember the reality of labor. If it did, no one would ever have more than one kid. I've decided that my brain does a similar thing with new courses - I've prepped several new courses over the last twelve years, and at least two of those were courses with no textbook or roadmap available, like the data class I'm teaching now, and yet I've somehow blocked out how much time it takes to do this. Even though I did a lot of the groundwork over the summer, I'm still spending several hours a week filling in the details for each class meeting. Hence, there hasn't been a lot of time for blogging. But although it's taking more time than I planned, I think things are going relatively well. The team-based learning approach definitely works well for the data analysis class, though it ...

Has anyone had experience with differentiated assignments? That is, where you specifically give students more than one option for an assignment and different options might be worth different grades (e.g., you have to do option A for a chance to earn an A or you can choose option B but then the highest grade you can get is a B)? I'm thinking about doing this because I have a couple of assignments where there is a possibility for some students to do something that is really a level above other students but I don't want to tell students they have to do that. For example, in my Economics for Teachers class , one of the projects is to develop a "mini-lesson" using an example from pop culture (music, movies, TV, etc.). Ideally, students would come up with their own example but there are also many sources that provide examples for them (some of which we will be specifically discussing in class). So I'm considering telling students that in order to earn an A, they m...

I survived the first week - 14 more to go! A brief summary of the week: The good: I was reminded many times this week that the vast majority of my students truly are good kids who just want to do well and learn something. Sadly, I have a tendency to forget that because I usually hear a lot more from students who are having problems (and are trying to avoid responsibility). Many students had questions about their clickers, or how the class is going to work, but every single one was polite and they all approached me with an attitude of "am I understanding this right?" rather than "why are you making us do this?". And even though the air conditioning does not seem to be working correctly in any of the classrooms, students were awake and engaged enough to speak up. In other words, so far, so good... The bad: I completely stressed myself out about the creation of the teams in my two sections of the data course. I had already planned to create the teams myself (rathe...

Just to follow up on my earlier post about grading participation : I decided that contract grading was going a bit far and instead will have a chunk of the semester grade that is based largely on completing assignments, attending class and otherwise engaging in the behaviors that should lead students to do better on their other assignments anyway. Taking a cue from Lisa Lane , I'm calling that portion "Class Contribution" and I've purposely left it vague how that portion is scored. What I say in the syllabus is that this will be determined in part by the peer evaluations (from their teams), completion of all assignments and participation in class, which I will track with their responses to clicker questions. Specifically, the syllabus says: Attendance and due dates: The team nature of this class requires you to be in class and to do your part as a member of your Team. This includes completing the individual component of Applications and submitting responses to clic...

In the last few weeks, I've found myself saying, on more than one occasion, that one reason I'm so stressed about this data course is that I think it could either go really well and students will really get a lot out of it, or it could be a total disaster and students will hate it. Putting aside my black-and-white thinking and my personal tendency to worry about worst-case scenarios, it has occurred to me that maybe these binary expectations are a good thing in the sense that they indicate I'm taking a risk (I remember someone making a similar observation about one of the winners on Top Chef - he was often either in the top three or the bottom three and that was seen as an indication that he was taking risks and being more innovative than others). If I never fail, it's a lot more likely that I'm not challenging myself enough than because I'm perfect. So I guess I'm proud of myself. But I also realize that I would probably not have taken this kind of risk a...

Twitter just announced a new feature that allows anyone, even those without Twitter accounts, to get someone's tweets via text. I immediately thought about using this for my students - I can create a Twitter account for each class/course and then students can choose to get reminders via text by texting (for example) "follow @Econ301" to 40404 (it's not 100% clear to me whether the @ sign is needed or not - the Twitter blog doesn't include it, this ReadWriteWeb post does). The reason I like this so much is that I've always thought this would be a great use of Twitter but I didn't want to force students to get accounts (way fewer students use Twitter than the mainstream media would have you believe). Lisa Lane also had a recent post about how to use Google Calendar to help students get text reminders of due dates but I'm not sure how many of my students use Google Calendar (and I think that method gets complicated if any of the due dates change). Bu...

A couple posts in Inside Higher Ed about Delicious.com got me thinking... I have a Delicious account but I almost never use it. I never really 'got' social bookmarking - it just has never seemed all that useful to me. From a personal standpoint, if there are websites that I use a lot, I bookmark them in Firefox so I can just go to the address bar and start typing what I remember of the page's title and it will show up in the pull-down menu (for example, when I need to access the SDSU homepage, I just go to the address box, start typing 'SDSU' and the homepage is the first thing in the suggested links box that pops up). If there are websites with information that I think I'll want later, I might save them to Delicious but even if I do, I have to go searching for them later and really, it often seems easier to simply Google whatever I'm looking for. I'm sure this is just a reflection of the way my memory works but if, for example, I come across a recipe...

ProfHacker had a post last week on contract grading and it's been simmering in my brain ever since. The particular contract that is discussed in the post is for a writing class and lists several things that students must do; as long as they do all the things on the list, they will get at least a B in the class. Some of the items on the list can be satisfied with participation ('meet due dates', 'complete all low stakes assignments like journal writing') while others are a little more subjective ('give thoughtful peer feedback', 'make substantive revisions') but none really has to do with the quality of a student's writing. In order to earn an A in the class, students must meet all the contract requirements for a B, plus produce 'exceptional' writing. The instructors essentially make the argument that if a student actually does everything on the list, they are likely to get a B anyway, and the contract allows both the instructors and the ...

Whoever it is, at least at San Diego State, seems oblivious to the fact that starting on a different day of the week every semester is really annoying for those of us who try to organize our classes consistently. I am annoyed by this every semester because no matter what days of the week I'm teaching on, I have to adjust the deadlines for my class assignments every single time. For example, this fall, classes start on a Monday, so the first meeting of my Tuesday/Thursday classes is on Tuesday and we will meet twice that week. In the spring, even if I still had classes on Tuesday/Thursday, the first class meeting would be on Thursday and we would meet only once the first week. Since I try to assign larger assignments over the weekend, that means I have to re-arrange things somewhere to get back on the same day-of-the-week assignment schedule as what I did in the fall. When I taught the large lecture on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I tried to have exams on Fridays and every single seme...

Geez, where the heck is the summer going? I can't believe it's August already! I had planned to have the data course completely prepped by now so that I could spend August working on other things but of course, things never turn out as planned. Thanks to several trips in July, I'm not nearly as prepped as I'd like but I thought I'd share something about what where I'm at. As I mentioned earlier in the summer , this course is not a typical statistics course - it really is a data analysis course. And I'll be teaching it using team-based learning . The TBL website and listserv have been incredibly helpful with that part. When I say that this is more of a data analysis course, I mean that we will talk about things like choosing what to count (e.g., if you want to know how income is distributed across households, how do you define 'income'? Once you settle on a variable, do you look at mean, median, different percentiles?) and how to measure those var...

One of the frustrating things about getting my degree at a big research school, and now being in a department of people who are (mostly) more interested in research than teaching, is that I often feel like I'm on my own when it comes to finding resources that would be helpful for teaching economics. Because my institution is relatively teaching-oriented (just not really my department), I do feel like there are people around I can turn to for help with certain pedagogy-related issues in general (SDSU has a particularly awesome ITS crew!) but when it comes to teaching economics , not so much. I do pester the tch-econ list-serv when I have a specific question (and if any economists reading this are not subscribers, go sign up NOW), and there are the obvious sources like the Journal of Economic Education and the RFE teaching resources , and now Starting Point too, but I've also had to find a lot of resources on my own (and of course, one of the reasons I started this blog was to ...

As I have been developing this data course, I have been trying to keep in mind that this is an economics course, and the focus is supposed to be (as the title of the course states) the Collection and Use of Data in Economics . From a data standpoint, that means exposing students to the types of data that economists use (which is not quite the same thing as 'economic data' but that's a topic for another post). From an analysis standpoint, that means that we have to talk about inference from observational data, issues with identifying causation vs. just correlation, multiple regression, etc. But I think it also means that we need to talk about the larger issue of what types of empirical questions do economists use data for ? I'm planning to start the semester with a discussion of what is, and what isn't, an empirical question, and get the students thinking about what kinds of questions can and can't be answered with data. In economics, we talk about this in ter...