Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In the Principles class, when I start the section on the structure of the tax system, I always ask students if they believe taxes are "too high, too low or about right". The majority always answer "too high". After reading a recent article by Bruce Bartlett [hat tip to Mark Thoma ] I'm now tempted to ask them more specific questions about their beliefs about taxes and the size of government, since Bartlett has done the work of finding the answers for me. I don't usually do such extended quotes but this is great stuff (I should also mention that the responses from the Tea Partyers are exactly why I think we need to teach this stuff in Principles): Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data , acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Securit...

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had to explain to my writing class why economists do specification checks (we've been reading some empirical journal articles) and how many of the students are not really familiar with the process that economists go through when we write empirical papers. I think that part of what is hard for students to grasp is the constant questioning we do (and this is true not only for economists, but anyone who does research). As an empirical economist, I'm always asking: does my model make sense? What else, other than the variables I'm focusing on, could be driving my results? Can I get data on those other variables? Is this really causation, or just correlation? Given that I will be teaching a data and statistics course next semester , I've been thinking about how I am going to teach students to ask similar questions. With that in mind, I thought a recent Freakonomics post was a great example of this process. Eric Morris has had a bunch ...

I'm off to a conference this week (is it really going to be warmer in Richmond, VA than in San Diego by Friday?!?) so thought I'd just share a few links that I've been meaning to write more about... Dan Hamermesh points out two examples of externalities on airplanes . As one commenter notes, I'm waiting for rules about crying babies... If you don't read Jodi Beggs' blog already, Economists Do It with Models , you really should. Two recent posts I particularly liked were on the stupidity of charging for 911 calls (with an excellent explanation of public goods and common resources) and the opportunity cost of weddings (though that one's by a guest poster). The New York Times Magazine had an outstanding piece on teaching that I really want to write more about but in the meantime, just go read it !

There was an article in Inside Higher Ed last week about the difficulty of teaching writing. Rob Weir offers some useful advice about using visualization to help students organize their thoughts and structure their papers. He concludes with this caveat: These models are strictly for students who struggle with organization. Every one of them is something that college students should have learned in high school. The models won’t add the magic that differentiates sparkling from pedestrian prose. They will not turn your students into Marlowe or even Sarah Vowell. Nor will they cure syntax errors, grammar, shallow thinking, or lack of command of the subject. What they can do is provide students with methods of imposing order upon randomness. Unfortunately for me (from this particular perspective), the students in my writing class all seem to have a decent grasp of basic organization already. The reason this is unfortunate for me is that since they are solid on basic organization, I have...

In a recent post, Derek Bruff raises an issue that has often nagged at me when reading articles or watching presentations about teaching and pedagogy: ...one of the principles I attempted to uphold when writing my book was that everyone’s teaching context is different–different students, different disciplines, different institutions, different teaching styles and experiences.  I’m interested in helping instructors think more intentionally about their teaching choices, exploring the pros and cons of choices both traditional and innovative.  So while I may be more excited myself about smart phone systems, I always encourage instructors to select technologies and teaching practices that make the most sense in their particular teaching contexts. As Bruff points out, every teaching context is different. Even when the contexts seem quite similar, different teachers may have different ideas about what will work 'best' for their students. Unfortunately, I often encounter people who f...

I did something today that I don't normally do - I directly confronted a student (actually, two) who wasn't engaged in class. I had asked a clicker question related to elasticities and gotten a really mixed answer distribution so I asked students explicitly to draw the graphs associated with each of the four possible responses (basically, the four possible combinations of elastic/inelastic supply/demand) and then I was going to re-ask the question. While they were supposedly drawing the graphs, I walked around the room. When I do this, there's always a disturbing number of students who are not doing what I've asked them to do. Even more disturbing is that there are always some students who are do not even make a pretense of caring; they aren't taking notes, they just sit there, sometimes texting on their phones but often, I really have no idea what they are doing. I usually ignore these students - I will sometimes remind them that if they never practice doing econ...

I primarily use Aplia to do experiments, rather than problem sets. When I started teaching the 500-seater, one thing I knew was that I didn't want to give up activities like having students participate in a market auction but I couldn't imagine how that would work in class so I adopted Aplia.Well, as I mentioned a while ago , there were a couple of presentations at the TIP conference in January that downright inspired me and one was by Jose Vazquez-Cognet , at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who discussed the double-oral auction that he does with his class of 800. To be clear, he does this in class, not using Aplia or some other computer simulator - he actually has 800 students milling around, trying to buy and sell from each other! I would never have imagined trying this in such a large class but listening to him explain what he does, it actually does sound do-able. One thing that helps is he creates smaller trading pits within the room: students can trade wit...