Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...

I always think it's a bit odd when textbook reps come by my office in the middle of the semester - I listen politely and then tell them (every single time), "I won't be thinking about this until the summer." It puzzles me because they never seem to come at a time of year that actually makes sense; I mean, does anyone ever decide to adopt a new textbook in the middle of the term? I sort of assume most professors are like me in that even if they are considering switching textbooks (or they are prepping a new course for which they need to choose a text), they wait until summer to sit down and think about it. Which is probably why I've seen at least a couple blog posts on the subject lately - the Teaching Professor had a post about the role of the text in course planning , pointing out that many faculty design their courses around the text, which can lead to too much focus on content, and Lisa Lane has a post about her personal experience finding an exceptional text ...