Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

A recent New York Times article points out that many children's books teach economic concepts (hat tip to Alex Tabarrok ). If that article piques your interest, the Council for Economic Education has a whole book that provides examples of children's stories that can be used to teach economics, including questions for students and follow-up activities. There's also a 2007 article by Yana V. Rodgers, Shelby Hawthorne and Ronald C. Wheeler, "Teaching Economics Through Children's Literature in the Primary Grades," in The Reading Teacher 61(1), p.46-55. That article lists the 'top five' books for a number of specific concepts; the full list of several hundred titles can be found at http://econkids.rutgers.edu/ , which is an entire website devoted to using children's literature to teach economics (also mentioned in a follow-up NYT post on Economix ). I should point out that although the obvious audience for these sorts of lessons is younger children, I...

As I mentioned at the end of my last post , SWoRD does provide an infrastructure that makes it easier to have students do peer review - students can submit papers electronically, the system can randomly assign multiple anonymous reviewers, I can create specific comment prompts so reviewers must give both numeric and open-ended comments, and students can back evaluate the reviews to indicate how helpful they were (or weren't). Given that I am a firm believer in the value of the peer review process overall, I would perhaps continue to use SWoRD if there were no other options that could serve the same function. But if I'm not going to use the grades generated by SWoRD (or if I need to do a lot of work to make those grades work for me), then I do have other options. Each would require some tweaking to do exactly what I want to do but from what I can tell, they all provide some advantages over SWoRD as well. Please note that I have not yet actually used any of the three tools I ment...

I really should have gotten back to this sooner but for those who are wondering how things went with SWoRD , the peer review writing site I used with my writing class in the spring, my overall reaction is that while it might be useful for some people, I probably won't use it the next time around. For those who missed my earlier posts, I discussed the basics of SWoRD , whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading , and some first reactions to SWoRD's reviewing process (after the first assignment) back in March. I made some tweaks as the semester progressed but overall, I have to say the experience was still pretty rough. To briefly recap, SWoRD is an online peer review system where 1) students upload their papers, 2) the system randomly assigns other students to anonymously review those papers, 3) peer reviewers give both open-ended comments and numeric ratings in response to instructor-generated prompts, 4) authors 'back evaluate' their reviews, which means they give...

It's a frustrating time to be an economist, though I can't decide if it's worse to be a micro- or macro-economist these days - I have to assume that many macro folks are tearing their hair out over the stupid things Washington is doing and the even stupidier things the media is often saying but at least when someone asks a macro person what they think of all this stuff going on, they supposedly are in a much better position to talk about it than most micro people (I'm not saying that stops me from talking anyway; I'm just sayin' that as a micro person, I don't spend my life studying these things and really, my understanding of things is only slightly better than what we teach in Econ 101). I've almost entirely stopped reading anything about the economy from regular news outlets because I kept seeing things that made me wonder if I had some basic economic concepts totally wrong, only to realize that my understanding is fine but reporters apparently didn...

This morning's Dilbert was perfectly timed as I was in the middle of trying to figure out the grade weights for my fall Econ for Teachers class and as usual, having a huge mental debate over how much weight to give 'participation'. A couple of Teaching Professor posts this summer hit on the same issue so it's already been at the back of my brain. In my data analysis course, participation is rolled into the team grades and that takes care of it; I've found that students have a strong tendency to 'punish' their peers for low participation by giving them low peer evaluation scores. But with the Econ for Teachers class, I do a lot of formative-type assessments that I'm not going to "grade" for content (e.g., student reactions to readings where I ask them to relate the reading to something in their own experience), so I have to decide how much credit to give students simply for completion. I want students to take those assignments seriously and th...