Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

For those attending the ASSA meetings, here are all the sessions I could find related to economic education. Also, if anyone wants suggestions for places to eat / things to do while in San Diego, particularly if you want to get away from the Gaslamp, feel free to drop me an email - I love sharing San Diego with folks! UPDATE: From Mark Maier: There will be a meeting for economic educators interested in community college instruction prior to the regular sessions, January 3, 2013, 4 PM. Manchester Grand Hyatt, Room Molly A&B . All welcome. Jan 04, 2013 8:00 am, Manchester Grand Hyatt, Manchester A American Economic Association Financial Literacy and Content Standards in the Schools (A2) (Panel Discussion) Panel Moderator: B. DOUGLAS BERNHEIM (Stanford University and National Bureau of Economic Research) ANNAMARIA LUSARDI (George Washington University) BRIGITTE C. MADRIAN (Harvard University) JOHN J. SIEGFRIED (Vanderbilt University) WILLIAM B. WALSTAD (University of Nebr...

I submitted final grades on Monday. About four hours later (my current record is ten minutes), the emails began. Some of the requests are legitimate; e.g., I hit the wrong key when entering grades in the online system so someone got a D+ who should have had a C+ (I'm sure that over the years, I've made similar errors in the other direction but funny how I never hear from those students!). Some of the requests are benign; e.g., students miscalculate what their final weighted average is so they think they have a higher grade than they received. Those are just time-consuming because I have to look up their actual score, and also use the spreadsheet I posted online for them to use to verify that they just made a mistake somewhere, but once I respond, I typically don't hear from them again. And then there are the real whiners who do not understand why they received the grade they did and have a sob story about why they 'need' a higher grade. These are the emails that...

Here are a few links if you want to procrastinate from grading, or get inspired for next semester... 2012 Christmas Price Index : The Cost of Christmas is up 4.8% this year. Each year, PNC makes the website a little more complicated. This year, you have to go around the world to find each item. If you have a slow internet connection, I think it would be kind of frustrating (each scene seems to take a while to load, even with a decent connection) but if you just want the punchline, click on 2012 Gift Price Index in the menu along the bottom. Deck the Halls with Macro Follies : The latest video from EconStories (the guys who brought us Hayek vs. Keynes ) has Keynes and other macro forefathers explaining their theories to the tune of Christmas carols. How Economics Saved Christmas : This 2010 parody of 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' is a great way to introduce externalities (hat tip to Economist Educators !). Tons of Quick Tips for Flipping Your Class : The 'flip...

Well, I managed to go the entire five weeks of the Blendkit course (and then some) without actually blogging about it (or about anything else for that matter). For awhile I was mired in mid-semester grading (I thought I was being so smart the way I spread out exams and papers but instead, as soon as I finished one stack, there was another one coming in), and then, well, life happened. I'll try to catch up with the blended stuff eventually... One of the things that has been distracting me is putting together my 'teaching portfolio'. My chair would like to nominate me for a teaching award, which is very cool, but I need to put together a teaching portfolio that he can submit with his nomination. Although I have a statement about my teaching that I wrote for my tenure and promotion reviews, this portfolio needs to be much more extensive. Specifically, the guidelines for the award say it should include "such items as: recommendation letter(s), summaries of student evalu...

Life has gotten the better of me the last few weeks but I hope to have some new posts up soon. In the meantime, this popped up in my Facebook feed and I just had to share: And remember, no matter how you feel about the election results, the one thing we can all be happy about is that the campaign  is over!

Since the end of last spring, I've been kicking around the idea of listing my writing class as a 'hybrid' class - i.e., a class that meets partially online. There are already several weeks in the course where I 'cancel' one of the class meetings because students are working on drafts and reviews and there isn't really anything for us to talk about as a group. So instead of having class, I tell students they can come meet with me individually to discuss their writing. There are also some class days where I feel like we don't really need to be meeting, that it would be just as easy to accomplish what we are doing online. So it wouldn't be that big a stretch to formally move to a hybrid structure where we meet face-to-face once a week and the other class 'meeting' is online. My department is also in the process of developing policies for handling the development of online (including hybrid) classes. We had some discussion last year when a collea...

One of my service assignments this year is marketing the scholarships that my department offers. In particular, we have one scholarship that is potentially quite large (could more than cover tuition and fees) that the original donor wanted us to use specifically to attract good students into the major. But for the last few years, we have had hardly any applicants, and almost none from incoming freshmen. So my department agreed to devote some funds to have someone work on outreach to high schools. I volunteered, since it seemed like a good complement to my other interests and would give me an opportunity to connect with some high school economics teachers. Over the summer, I put together some materials about the scholarship and about economics in general, and started emailing people. So far, I've lined up a few visits to econ classes and also some AVID classes (for those who aren't familiar with it, AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination and is a college readi...

... you are at Sea World and when you see all the strollers 'parked' outside Shamu Stadium, your first thought is, "This would make a great example of product differentiation!" Tutor2U has some more pictures that could be used to show economic concepts, with this description of a cool assignment for your students: My first assignment for my AS Economics group this week is to get their smartphones or tablets out and in pairs find some time to explore our locality to shoot examples of economics around them. They then select six of their favourite images and turn them into a Prezi or a PowerPoint and explain to the group why their images raise interesting economics questions.

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments , team applications , peer evaluations/team grades , and student responses ] For those who have been following along with this series, I hope it's clear by now that TBL is pretty dramatically different from traditional chalk-and-talk. After teaching this way, it's actually really hard for me to stand up and 'lecture' in any class for more than about ten minutes. For those who are curious to find out more, the absolute best place to start is the Team-Based Learning website . The book by Michaelson, et al, is also a good starting place. To wrap up, I thought I'd address some of the questions that I think folks might have if you're considering adopting TBL... How do you get student buy-in? As I mentioned in my last post , I think it's crucial for students to understand why we are using TBL. One thing I do on the first day is ask the two questions in this article in The National Teaching and Lea...

Classes start tomorrow and I'm feeling oddly anxious. For some reason, I seem to be having a particularly hard time getting mentally into 'school mode' - I've been saying for the last week that it just doesn't feel like it's time to start classes yet. I think my problem is that we are starting a full week before Labor Day; the last few years, I think we started on Wednesday or Thursday so I had to be on campus for advising and such for a few days at the beginning of the week before starting classes and could get mentally prepared. Although I was on campus a few days last week, it just doesn't feel the same... I'm always a little bit nervous for my first classes of the semester, though the nerves generally go away as soon as I start talking. I remember feeling like I was almost going to throw up before walking into the 500-seater the first time. It helps when I already know students in the class; last spring, about two-thirds of my writing class were s...

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments , team applications and peer evaluations/team grades ] At the end of every semester, I survey my students specifically about both PollEverywhere and TBL. The questions are largely adapted from a survey that SDSU's Instructional Technology Services asks all clicker-using faculty to give. I've summarized the responses from the last three semesters (click on the image to see full-size). Response was most positive (highest percentages agreeing or strongly agreeing with most of the statements) in Spring 2011, when I had two sections of 75 students each; the positive responses fall a little in the 2011-12 school year (not sure why) but over 80% still said TBL makes them more likely to attend class and to feel more involved in class, about two-thirds would choose a TBL section over another section of the same course that does not use TBL, and (most important to me) over three-quarters still said that they felt they gained...

I'll take a short break from my TBL series to share a couple of resources that you may find helpful if, like me, you're tweaking your fall classes and looking for some new material... Economics memes : I think anyone who is on Facebook, or receives email for that matter, has seen some version of various internet memes, which wikipedia defines as any idea that is propagated through the internet: "The idea may take the form of a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag, or just a word or phrase... The meme may spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, news sources or other web-based services." The Economics memes site provides a collection of econ-related memes, as well as some information about how to use memes in your class. [Note: the Most Interesting Man in the World picture is actually from the Cengage Facebook page , and Jodi Beggs has a bunch of other  variations on the Most Interesting Man meme]. Div.E.Q. : Diversifying Econo...

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments and team applications ] In this post, I'll go over how my students' course grades are calculated and the role of peer evaluations. I think the peer evaluations are probably the part of TBL that students are most worried about at the beginning of the semester, and the aspect that I get asked about the most by faculty. I want to say right off the bat that in the four semesters (eight classes) I've used TBL, I have not seen a single evaluation that appeared to be a student or team trying to 'game the system' (i.e., 'rewarding' a friend or 'punishing' someone unfairly). I've seen a few where students seemed to be not putting in much effort or thought but it has never caused someone's grade to be different than I thought made sense. Grade weights Many TBLers have the students themselves determine how much weight will be given to team and individual activities. The way Larry Michaels...

[For an overview of TBL, see this post ] In my last post, I described the Readiness Assessment process ; by the time students are done with the team RA, they are ready for the fun stuff: the team applications. For the next several class meetings, class time is almost entirely devoted to teams working on problems that require they think through and discuss the kind of data issues that empirical researchers routinely address. During the all-class discussion that follows the team discussions, my contribution tends to be limited to directing the discussion. I may spend a few minutes at the end of class tying together concepts but that's as close as I get to lecturing. TBL 'guidelines' say that good applications should satisfy the 4 S's: Significant problem, Same problem, Specific choice, Simultaneous report. Significant problem This seems sort of obvious - of course you want students to be working on problems that are 'significant', which I take to mean both r...

[Today (July 31) is the last day to complete the  blog reader survey  if you want to be included in the drawing for a free copy of  The Intl Handlbook on Teaching and Learning Economics . Thank you!] My last post outlined the basic structure of TBL. That structure can be summarized as a) students acquire basic concepts  on their own, b) students are assessed to make sure they actually have acquired those concepts, c) class time is spent on application exercises that require they use that basic knowledge in more complex ways, and d) students assess their teammates and those evaluations are used to 'weight' the team portion of each individual's final grade. In this post, I'll talk about the first stages of the cycle, where students acquire basic concepts and are assessed on those. Although there has been a lot of discussion recently about 'flipped classrooms', I'm wary of pushing too much content acquisition outside the classroom in classes like micro ...

[If you haven't completed the blog reader survey yet, please take a few minutes to do so (before July 31 if you want to be included in the drawing for a free copy of The Intl Handlbook on Teaching and Learning Economics ). Thank you!] Although I know I've mentioned the fact that I use Team-Based Learning (TBL) in my data analysis class, I can't believe I haven't written a series of posts yet to really explain what I'm doing and how it's working. So here we go... Keep in mind that the class is called Collection and Use of Data in Economics (if anyone's interested, you can get the syllabus here ); it is an upper-division required course for all econ majors and they must have already taken Principles (both 101 and 102), lower-division statistics, and an Information Systems course that covers Excel and databases. For those who know nothing about TBL, the basic idea is that students spend the majority of class time working in permanent teams (i.e., they k...

At the beginning of every semester, I have my students fill out an information sheet where I gather some basic background, like their major, hometown, other econ courses, personal interests, etc. I feel like I can be more effective if I know something about who they all are. Here on the blog, I have sometimes struggled as I write posts because  I don't really have a good idea of who is reading what I write. I mean, I have a general idea - I assume you all are somehow interested in economics and/or teaching (well, aside from my mom :-)) - but that's about all I really know. It finally dawned on me that I should just ask (duh!).  So, if you are a regular reader, will you please complete  this short survey ? By 'short', I mean it should take you about five minutes. I figured summer would be a good time to do this but I know that even for those few minutes, there are opportunity costs and some of you may need an extra incentive, so everyone who responds by July 31 will be e...

In the past, I have regularly used Discussion Boards (within the Blackboard LMS) to have students post reflections or questions related to assigned readings. But I've really only used the Discussion Board tool because there was no better alternative; I've never been a big fan of the interface. The threads just seem clunky and I don't think students actually read what other students post unless I specifically assign them to do so. So now that my university has updated to Blackboard 9, which has blogs, wikis and journals, I'm considering using one or more of these options instead. While wikis are specifically for collaborative creation of a common product, blogs and journals allow students to write individual posts or comments. From what I can tell, the main difference between Blackboard's blogs and journals seems to be that journals are intended to be private; students write entries that are only visible to the instructor (although there is an option to make the e...

Last year, I wrote a lot about my experience with SWoRD , a site that facilitates peer review of writing (including generating grades from peer review scores). Although I think there are a lot of neat things about SWoRD, there were also a lot of problems and I decided not to use it for the writing class this past spring. Instead, I used Turnitin's PeerMark tool, which is integrated into my school's Blackboard system. Compared to last year, I made a few adjustments to the writing and reviewing process. The general pattern was that students would submit first drafts on Mondays, by class time; those papers would be made available to reviewers at the end of a two-hour grace period (i.e., class started at 3:30pm and papers were available to reviewers at 5:30pm so slightly late papers could still get reviewed without messing up any of the assignments) and reviews were due by class time on Wednesday (again with a two-hour grace period). Depending on the assignment, students revi...