Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

On Tuesday, I got to spend the day learning about various aspects of assessment, at SDSU's One Day in May symposium.  So much good stuff! Although I think of myself as relatively savvy about a lot of tools, and a definite data junky, I got lots of ideas about things I could be doing to track analytics in Blackboard and Google Docs. I haven't been a huge Google Docs user so I had no clue that there are so many cool things you can do with spreadsheet gadgets (like create word clouds or interactive timelines, a la Gapminder ). The day got me thinking about how I could use certain tools and I started looking for new ways to deal with one of my most time-consuming tasks. I have a couple different situations where I collect information from students that I want to pass on to other students (e.g., team peer evaluations in the data class or reviewer back evaluations in the writing class). Currently, the way I do that is either through emailing each student or putting the informati...

Every once in a while, one of the list-servs I'm on will get messages from people who want to be removed from the list (and apparently don't know how to look for the instructions about how to do so). This morning, there were several on the TBL list-serv and one person added the explanatory note "too many emails, too little time". While I understand the feeling, I also sort of don't. I mean, how many emails do academics really get? I know that compared to my friends who work in the private sector, I really don't get a lot, and I certainly don't get a lot that require immediate attention. That doesn't mean I don't read/answer my emails pretty darn quickly, but rarely do I need to respond as quickly as I do. However, I do know that when I see there is something in my inbox, I have a tendency to want to drop whatever I'm doing and see what that message is. So I've set up a system where I don't immediately see a lot of the emails that ...

"Regular" posts should hopefully resume relatively soon but as the grading stack slowly goes down, I'll just share a couple of links that provide some great suggestions for books on (mostly college) teaching. Rebecca Onion 's list is based on suggestions from her Twitter community and includes some teaching classics but also some that are more about the general state of higher education (rather than specific teaching advice). Sherman Dorn builds on Onion's list with several books that are likely to be more helpful for new teachers. I have to particularly second his recommendation of Teaching What You Don't Know , by Therese Huston, which I found invaluable when I was preparing to teach the data analysis course two years ago.

The new issue of the Journal of Economic Education is now available. I was particularly happy to see an article by Donna Gilleskie and Mike Salemi that eases my mind a bit about how I teach Principles: in "The Cost of Economic Literacy: How Well Does a Literacy-Targeted Principles of Economics Course Prepare Students for Intermediate Theory Courses?", they find that "students who complete a literacy-targeted principles course perform no worse in intermediate theory courses than students who complete a traditional principles course." Table of contents: The Cost of Economic Literacy: How Well Does a Literacy-Targeted Principles of Economics Course Prepare Students for Intermediate Theory Courses? Donna B. Gilleskie and Michael K. Salemi The Effects of a Translation Bias on the Scores for the Basic Economics Test Jinsoo Hahn and Kyungho Jang Does Living Near Classmates Help Introductory Economics Students Get Better Grades? Jeffrey Parker Sources of Fund...

I'm at that point in the semester/assignment cycle where I'm getting a lot of emails from students who are working on their final papers. Some will ask me in class if they can send me a draft to look over. What I generally tell them is that while I won't "pre-grade" their papers, I will certainly let them know if they are (or aren't) on the right track. This is particularly an issue with a couple of assignments where students have a tendency to mis-understand what I am asking them to do. For example, in my writing class, I ask students to write a short (400 word) proposal for a policy brief - they are not supposed to write the brief itself (which was the focus of a previous assignment where they were assigned topics), nor try to make an argument for or against a policy, but they should think about what policy topic they would want to investigate and write a proposal to convince me that such an investigation is needed. No matter how I explain it (and I have no...