Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

OK, someone really needs to save me from myself... Just to make life more interesting, I've decided that it would be cool to teach this new data course using team-based learning (TBL). For those not familiar with TBL, the basic idea is that students are organized into 5-7 person teams that stay together through the entire semester and then as much of the course as possible is built around team activities. So now, on top of trying to figure out the basic content and topics for a course I've never taught before, I'm also trying to figure out how to structure assignments and assessments using a method I've never used before.* Fun! Actually, it's not quite as crazy as it sort of seems (at least, that's what I keep telling myself) - designing a team-based learning course basically requires backward design, which I was doing anyway , and in a TBL course, the instructor doesn't really do traditional lectures, which I really don't want to do. Instead, studen...

For those who will be in Portland , I went through the program and tried to find the econ ed sessions. Also, as the Western regional rep for CSWEP , I'll be 'hosting' the CSWEP breakfast on Thursday, July 1, 7-9am, so feel free to stop by and say hi! Wednesday, June 30, 12:30–2:15 p.m. CREATING UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AND FIELD EXPERIENCES (ROUNDTABLE) Organizer: Melanie Fox Kean, Austin College, and Eric Dodge, Hanover College Chair: Melanie Fox Kean, Austin College, and Eric Dodge, Hanover College Papers: Elizabeth Perry-Sizemore, Randolph College, Mary O. Borg, University of North Florida, Stephen B. DeLoach, Elon University, and Sheila Kennison, Oklahoma State University Creating Quality Undergraduate Research Programs in Economics C. Beth Haynes, Brigham Young University Hawaii One for the Money, Two for the 'Know,' Three to Get Ready, and Four to Go: Facilitating Undergraduate Research in Developing Countries Eric Dodge, Hanover College Dam Economic...

By now, a lot of academics (or at least academic economists) have heard about Scott Carrell and James West's paper on professor quality . They use data from the Air Force Academy (where students are randomly assigned to core courses and take common exams) and find that the 'value-added' of professors in intro courses is both positively correlated with student evaluations and negatively correlated with 'value-added' in follow-on courses (which the authors talk about as evidence of 'deep learning'). Basically, professors who seem to be better at inducing 'deep learning' in their intro students are also more likely to get lower evaluations from those students. On the one hand, I have to say that this feels kind of validating for people like me - that is, I care a lot about helping my students learn to think critically and I think I put a lot of effort into trying to foster deep learning, rather than allowing my students to just memorize stuff, but I ...

I should clarify something I said last week about how this data and statistics course I'm prepping isn't really a standard course: I do know there are lots of econ departments that offer an economic statistics course that is a step below econometrics. I guess what I was thinking is that the intention behind this course was specifically to give students tangible skills working with data, so there is supposed to be a heavy emphasis on finding and accessing economic data and using Excel to manipulate that data, rather than on formulas and statistical theory (which students presumably should have already had anyway, in a lower-division required statistics course). But my impression is that a lot of econ statistics courses for majors at other schools are really more stats courses, just with econ-related examples*. The interesting thing is that the Siegfried, et al, report ("The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major, JEE, Summer 1991) discusses this very situation (emph...

Given that I've never taught statistics, I eagerly read this Tomorrow's Professor post on Teaching What You Don't Know, which led me to Therese Huston's book by the same name. I haven't read all of it yet but I started with chapter 3, "Getting Ready" (yeah, I jumped ahead but Huston even says it's OK - the chapter starts with: "If you've just been assigned to teach a course that's outside your specialty and you're barely hanging on as it is..., you might have skipped directly to this chapter and bypassed everything else. That's fine."). The first thing that Huston suggests is 'planning backward': Fortunately, you can turn to the proven educational principle of backward design, also known as planning backward, to organize your class in a way that maximizes student learning and focuses your daily preparation. It's called "backward" design because you begin with the end product first: what do you want stud...

After a few weeks of catching up on referee reports and other projects that I should have done a long time ago but ignored because of classes, plus simply some much-needed piddling, I'm back in the teaching saddle and starting to design the new course I'll be teaching in the fall. Most economists (and, I assume, many other University professors) rarely actually purposely design courses. That is, a lot of professors start out as teaching assistants during graduate school, which usually means we just do whatever the professor we're working for tells us to do. When we move on to teaching our own classes, if it's a course for which we T.A.'ed, then we just follow whatever the professor we worked for did in that course. If it's a new course, we find other people who have taught the course and ask them for help, which amounts to getting their syllabus and maybe old assignments and exams. Once in a blue moon, someone might develop a course that hasn't really be...