Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...

A friend is starting a new teaching position this fall and I put together some suggested readings and resources for her and then realized that readers here might want find it useful too. So here are some articles and other resources that might be helpful for anyone teaching "large" econ classes (I put "large" in quotes because it really is relative - in my department, "large" means hundreds but at other schools, classes of 50 are considered "large"). I will readily admit a huge bias here as I started with the papers/projects I've personally been involved in! Buckles, S., G. Hoyt and J.Imazeki (2012), "Making the large-enrollment course interactive and engaging," in K. McGoldrick and G. Hoyt (eds), International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics , pp. 118-128. Hoyt, G., J. Imazeki, M. Kassis and D. Vera (2010), "Interactive large enrollment economics classes," in M. K. Salemi and W. B. Walstad (eds), Teaching ...