Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...