Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I won’t be in Philadelphia but for those attending the meetings, here are all the education-related sessions I could find (please let me know if I missed any!): Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Grand Ballroom - Salon L American Economic Association Experiments and the Economics Classroom (I2) (Panel Discussion) Panel Moderator : TISHA EMERSON (Baylor University) SHERYL BALL (Virginia Tech) TED BERGSTROM (University of California-Santa Barbara) CHARLES HOLT (University of Virginia) JOHN MORGAN (University of California-Berkeley) Jan 03, 2014 12:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 305 National Association of Economic Educators Determinants of Student Achievement in High School and Undergraduate Economics and Personal Finance Classrooms (A2) Presiding : ANDREW HILL (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) Does Student Engagement Affect Student Achievement in High School Economics Classes? JODY HOFF (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) JANE LOPUS (California Sta...

Actual inflation might be running low but according to PNC's annual Christmas Price Index , the cost of Christmas is up 7.7% (or 6.9% if you sum up ALL the gifts for all the repetitions of the song). Of the individual items, nine ladies dancing is up the most, 20% - perhaps a sign of growing gender wage equality? PNC also calculates a 'core' index (10.6%) that excludes the swans, since they are the most volatile item in the basket, and they point out that this is analogous to the core CPI which excludes food and energy. Also, if anyone needs gift ideas for academic friends, this mug is a must-have! (also available as a t-shirt !)

If you haven't seen the call for submissions yet, the AEA is looking for proposals for the Fourth Annual AEA Conference on Teaching (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) and Research in Economic Education (all levels, including precollege). The conference will be held from May 28 to May 30, 2014 in Washington, DC at the Washington Marriott at Metro Center.  The conference is hosted by the Committee on Economic Education in cooperation with the  Journal of Economic Education .  Plenary talks will be given by Alan Blinder (Princeton), Kenneth G. Elzinga (UVA), Cecilia Rouse (Princeton) and other speakers TBA. Submissions for program participation will be accepted via the AEA online submission system. Submissions may be of individual papers, complete sessions of three or four papers, workshops, or panels. Complete session submissions are encouraged. The submission deadline is December 1, 2013. More information is available at  http://www.aeaweb.org/ committees/AEAC...

I’m getting ready for the 9th Annual Economics Teaching Conference later this week, in Austin. I’m doing two presentations, one Thursday morning on using cell phones in the classroom (i.e., Bring-Your-Own-Device audience response systems) and one Friday morning that is an Introduction to Team-Based Learning . If you’ll be there, come say hi!

I spent last Friday at the EconEd conference in Florida where I was part of a panel on ‘flipping the classroom’. The whole day was great, starting with the first session with Alex Tabarrok talking about “why online education works”. He had a lot of good points about the time and cost savings associated with online education but there was something that kept nagging at me. As I thought about it more, I realized that what was bugging me is also the main source of my general discomfort with most discussions about the benefits online education: those benefits largely seem to be tied to a model of education where ‘learning’ really just means ‘knowledge transfer’. That is, as far as I can tell, most of the time and cost savings of ‘online education’ are associated with moving lectures online, not necessarily any other aspect of the classroom learning experience. Now, sure, if a teacher is currently standing at the front of the room and talking to the students, then it absolutely makes se...

Unfortunately, that isn’t the headline on any of the media articles about the NBER working paper by Northwestern economists David Figlio, Morton Schapiro (who is also Northwestern’s President) and Kevin Soter. I wasn’t actually going to write about this, mostly because David is a really good friend (not to mention an outstanding economist) and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to say what I wanted to say without sounding like I was unjustly criticizing his work. But fortunately, a couple of other people have made the points I wanted to make (mostly without sounding overly critical of the authors). The basic gist is this: the Figlio, et al, paper got a ton of press last week for supposedly finding that “Adjuncts are better teachers than tenured professors” (that’s the headline from the Chronicle ), thus causing many in the higher ed community to freak out. But what most of those stories seemed to miss (or glossed over) was that the non-tenured (or non-tenure-track) instructors i...

In honor of National Unmarried and Single Americans Week , I’m going to pose a question that may be somewhat controversial: Is there an economic rationale for government incentives to get married? By ‘government incentives to get married’, I’m talking about all the ways in which the government (and society in general) privileges married people. Of course, this is something that the gay community has been yelling about for a long time but I think many straight people don’t really, fully grasp the extent of the issue.* One widely-cited statistic is that there are over 1000 benefits, rights and protections in Federal laws that are based on marital status. Some of these benefits can still be obtained by the unmarried, with additional work (e.g., I can manually change the beneficiary for my retirement accounts or sign an advanced health directive so my partner can make medical decisions for me) but many are simply not available to unmarried people, period. It’s no wonder that single-sex co...

Do you use mind maps? I don’t. Or at least, I didn’t, before a few weeks ago. I’d heard/read about other people who use them but I’ve never been that interested, I think partly because the examples I’ve always seen have looked kind of, well, messy , with circles and branches all over the place (the example I found for this post being a case in point!). So I associated mind maps with more creative, non-linear thinking. In contrast, I am very much a structured-outline kind of girl. Along those lines, I am also a huge maker of To Do lists, mostly organized the old-fashioned way: written on random bits of paper, kept together and loosely organized on a clipboard. But a few weeks ago, I read an article that, for some reason, got me thinking that maybe I should give mind mapping a try. Even though the article contains one of those really messy mind map examples I find completely intimidating, I happened to read it when I was in the middle of going through all the different projects I’m...

On September 6, the Flipped Learning Network is hosting “Flip your classroom” day. More info at http://www.flippedday.org/ . You could use one of Mary McGlasson’s videos (described in more detail a few weeks ago ), or one of Liam Lenten’s sports economics videos (described in this post ). MobLab is a new site that hosts interactive games that students can access from mobile browsers as well as laptops. I did a demo last month and it looks pretty slick. I could definitely see using this as an alternative to Aplia’s experiments in Principles (especially if, like me , you like Aplia more for the experiments than the problem sets) plus they have a lot of games for upper-division courses. I really should have posted this earlier in the summer but if you or someone you know is teaching for the first time this fall, you may want to look at a paper I have forthcoming in the Southern Economic Journal : “A Primer for New Teachers”, written with Gail Hoyt and Brandon Sheridan. The paper o...

Today is the first official day of my sabbatical – woohoo! Of course, one could argue that my sabbatical really began when the spring semester ended but today is the first official day of the fall semester at school so it’s the first day I don’t “have” to be on campus when I otherwise would. Whenever I tell non-academics about my sabbatical, I feel a little guilty. I know that a lot of my non-academic friends don’t really understand why academics like me even get sabbaticals. After all, it’s not like I’m in archeology or art history or some other discipline where people obviously need the time away from teaching in order to go do field work. I’m not even leaving town this time around. I usually just explain that even if I can get some research done while teaching, I can get a whole lot more done when I have bigger chunks of uninterrupted time. But I think the main reason I feel guilty is because I know that for me, sabbatical is not really about getting work done (although work WI...

This is the last of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. Part I describes how she came to create a set of videos for a hybrid course and Part II discusses how she holds students accountable for watching them. PART III: How did I make the videos? Instructors often contact me asking how I created the videos. Short answer? With LOTS of time and patience. You see, there is no single step in the process that is terribly difficult, but each of the steps does require time. Below (click image to enlarge) is a summary version of the crash course in Digital Storytelling that I co-facilitated at our college ( adapted from " Digital Storytelling Contest " website ). I f you are interested, you can use this link to check out the Chandler-Gilbert workshop page – the PDF of the table below is available for download on that page, so you will have links that work (here, I used screenshots of the table, so of course the links are...

This is the second of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. Part I discussed her decision to create a set of videos for use with a hybrid principles course. PART II: How to keep the students accountable to watch (and process) the video content? In that last entry , I said, “I needed to be sure that my students worked through the content on their own, or the face-to-face portion would be a total loss.“ But I didn’t really mention how I keep them on task, did I? Students in my classes are kept accountable because they have to answer a set of practice questions on each of the videos they've been assigned for homework. They are assigned “Video Homework” each week, where they need to (1) watch each assigned video, and (2) complete an assigned set of questions about that video’s content by the assigned due date. These days, Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle, etc.) make it easy for the instruct...

This is the first of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. PART I: What possessed me to undertake this video project? Let me introduce myself – I am Dr. Mary McGlasson, Economics faculty (and faculty developer for emerging technologies) at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, one of ten sister colleges in the Maricopa District. Our college serves about 14,000 students annually, and student learning is at the heart of all that we do. One strategy that we have taken with our Economics courses is to offer a wide variety of modalities – traditional (16 week, face-to-face), compressed (8 week, face-to-face), online, and hybrid (a mix of face-to-face and online) – for students to choose from. Seven years ago, I agreed to offer our college’s first hybrid Economics class. How hard could it be? After all, my face-to-face classes were already web-enhanced, heavily using the features of the Learning Management System (Blackboard, at the ti...

This is a guest post from Liam Lenten from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  Hello to all Economics for Teachers readers. I was at the Westerns last week, and came across Jennifer’s session on clicking technologies . She has been gracious in allowing me to provide a guest post, so here goes: As many of you are aware, much of (particularly) Microeconomics is about human decision-making. Since students make many decisions in their own daily lives, it should be easy to be taught effectively. The sports and cultural sectors have much (still untapped) potential to contribute to student understanding. By using interactive means such as YouTube and other internet resources, the classroom experience can be made more contemporary, relevant and interesting. I wanted to take this concept to its zenith – and as such, a year ago I wrote (and present in) a series of six short videos, called Some Sports Economics , with the aim of making a significant pedagogical contribution to te...

At the Westerns, I was part of a session on interactive teaching titled, “Flipping, Clicking and Other Contortions to Make Your Classes More Interactive”. Unfortunately, one of the participants, the one who was specifically going to talk about flipping his class, was struck with flight problems and couldn’t make it. However, he was kind enough to make a video of his presentation that we could show during the session. If anyone is interested, Steven also put the video (broken into two parts) onto YouTube, here and here . I also tried to record the other three presentations using Camtasia but there are problems with the sound (Steven’s video was actually running in the background and although the sound was muted at the time, Camtasia recorded Steven’s voice with the other presentations). So rather than posting the videos, here are (links to) the slides: Brandon Sheridan on Getting started with interactive teaching Mary Flannery on Interactive learning through current events (pdf of ...

I started this blog as a way to think through what I’m doing with my classes. At the time, I had no idea what would happen, if I’d stick with it, if anyone would read what I wrote. Although my writing ebbs and flows, I think blogging has been incredibly useful and has undoubtedly helped me improve as a teacher. I talked about some of those benefits in a session at the 2012 ASSA meetings, summarized in my post “ Why I blog about teaching (and you should too!) ”. If you’ve ever thought about getting into this blogging thing, Lee Skallerup Bessette, who blogs on InsideHigherEd , will be doing a free webinar , An Introduction to Academic Blogging, July 10, 2013 (starting at 10am, PST – the website doesn’t say how long it will last). And if you want to start with a few guest posts here, just let me know!

I’m about to get on a plane for Seattle where my session on Saturday, 4:30pm, looks to be one of only two sessions related to teaching. If anyone is attending, please come by! [101] Saturday, June 29, 4:30 – 6:15pm Flipping, Clicking and Other Contortions to Make Your Classes More Interactive (panel) Jennifer Imazeki, San Diego State University Mary Flannery, University of Notre Dame Brandon Sheridan, North Central College Steven Slezak, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo [169] Sunday, June 30, 4:30-6:15pm Teaching Economics Chair: Mark Holmgren, Eastern Washington University Papers: Mark Holmgren, Eastern Washington University, Do Giffen Goods Exist in Academic Learning? Susan Jacobson, Regis College, Beyond Content: What Should We Be Doing in Our Classrooms? Paul Johnson, University of Alaska, Anchorage, and Jonathan Alevy, University of Alaska, Anchorage, A Classroom Financial Market Experiment Mark Leonard, American University in Bulgaria, The Use ...

Some folks may have noticed that my posting is pretty sporadic. I was just looking at my stats and when I first started this blog (can’t believe it’s been five years!), I posted roughly every few days during the first year. Then it slowed down to about once a week. For the last several months, it’s been closer to once every few weeks, and some of those have been more public service announcements than me really writing about anything I’m personally doing with my teaching. This pattern is partly a reflection of what’s been happening with my classes – one reason I started this blog was as a place to ‘think aloud’ about what I was doing with some courses that were new to me and I was trying all kinds of random stuff, so it’s probably natural that over time, as I’ve honed what I’m doing, I haven’t felt the same need to write about them. It’s also a reflection of what’s been happening with me emotionally with regard to teaching – I’m definitely feeling burnt out. There is a reason that teac...

The 9th Annual Economics Teaching Conference  (sponsored by the National Economics Teaching Association and Cengage Learning) will be in Austin on October 24 and 25. The call for papers is here , and there is an 'extra early bird' discount if you register by May 31. You can also try for a free trip to the conference by competing for Cengage's Second Annual Economist Educator Best in Class Award . Submissions are due by July 8. And the National Association of Economic Educators has a Call for Papers out for the 2014 ASSA meetings: The National Association of Economic Educators and the Council on Economic Education will conduct three sessions at the January 2014 meetings of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) and American Economic Association (AEA) annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania January 3-5, 2014. New research papers on any relevant topic in economic education will be considered. Those interested in presenting a paper should send an abstract or...

The other night, Joey and I were walking to our favorite neighborhood brewpub for dinner. I saw what looked like a twenty dollar bill on the ground and I swear to God, my first thought was, "That can't actually be a twenty." I'm not sure I would have actually kept walking if I were alone but Joey did not even hesitate - he pointed at the money, said, "whoa!", and picked up what turned out to be TWO twenties. Honestly, I still couldn't quite believe they were just lying there, like maybe they were counterfeit, or someone had planted them and was just waiting to see what we would do. I had to explain the joke to Joey (who is a computer engineer) and he just said, "Well, good thing I'm not an economist, isn't it?" Amen to that...

I mentioned at the start of the semester that I'd be trying a different approach to grading in the writing class this spring. I've finished grading the second big writing assignment and I have to say that although grading is taking just as long as it used to, I definitely notice a reduction in my level of stress about the process. There are two main things that I've changed: one, I am only assigning straight letter grades for papers (i.e., A, B, C or D, recorded as 4, 3, 2 or 1 in the Blackboard gradebook) and two, students are allowed to revise and re-submit papers as many times as they want, any time up until the last day of class, and I will use whatever grade they receive last (which will presumably be higher than where they started but only if they actually do the work). Giving straight letter grades has greatly reduced my angst about assigning the score for the overall assignment. For the most part, it's pretty easy to tell B papers from C papers but what I re...

If you aren't on the tch-econ mail list , you might have missed this: Paul Hettler is putting together one or two special sessions on the use of active learning strategies in economics. Paul notes: "This is the seventh year I've created such sessions. In the past, we've seen some very interesting presentations on the use of several different strategies in principles through upper-level courses. If you are using an interesting learning strategy, others would like to hear about it. Please consider sending a brief abstract of what you are doing in for this session (Note, there are no submission fees if you send the abstract directly to me). The session will be rather informal--if you have a formal analysis comparing the learning outcomes of some active strategy to 'lectures' that's great; if you just want to describe the technique you're using and provide anecdotal evidence of it's effectiveness that is good too. In all cases, the idea is to learn...

As an economist, I know that policies often have unintended consequences. As an ed policy researcher, I know that the unintended consequences of many education policies arise because a) policymakers generally have no idea what a teacher's job is actually like and b) local implementation of state and federal policies often focuses more on 'compliance' than 'educational quality'. I was reminded of both these problems when I received an email from our administration about Section 133 of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which deals with textbook information. Apparently, this federal law requires that students have access to information on course materials prior to registration. This, in and of itself, seems benign. I think the prices that students pay for textbooks and associated materials are often outrageous and letting students know what they're signing up for is good (pointless, but good, since I can't imagine any student chooses classes based on textb...

As I gear up for teaching the writing class again this spring, I've been thinking a lot about how to make the grading more tolerable. In a Profhacker post last September, Brian Croxall summed up my own feeling about grading pretty well: "The thing that I dislike most about teaching is grading... The reason I typically don’t like grading is because my grading sessions often leave me feeling conflicted about the final scores I give students. “Is this essay an 87 (AKA a B)? Or is it an 88? How does it compare to that 84 I just read?” For personal reasons, my internal fairness meter gets really worked up by this process, and I have found that grading papers produces a bathetic (and pathetic) amount of handwringing on my part that is not productive in any which way." Croxall goes on to say that he planned to try using only straight letter grades on papers (i.e., A, B, etc. with no pluses or minuses): "...while it might be hard to know the difference between an 87...