Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Although Commencement was last weekend, I've still been immersed in teaching. For starters, last Wednesday was SDSU's Course and Curriculum Design Institute's One Day in May symposium. The theme this year was 'Learning to Write, Writing to Learn' and I gave a presentation on my experience with SWoRD . FYI, my slides are available on slideshare (or the CDI wiki ), and writing everything up is at the top of my summer blogging schedule. The short version is that it was a very bumpy semester and I'm not ready to recommend anyone else try it, at least not if you have other peer review options available to you... I've also been getting ready for the AEA's National Conference on Teaching Economics and Research in Economic Education . I'll be participating in a panel on Team-Based Learning in the 3pm session on Wednesday, and another panel on teaching large classes in the 3:15pm session on Thursday (the full program can be found here ). If you're ...

[If you missed them, I discussed the basics of SWoRD and whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading in earlier posts. I also have a follow-up post in August] In addition to generating a writing grade from students' numeric rubric scores, SWoRD also generates a reviewing grade. My understanding is that a student's reviewing grade is based half on that student's 'consistency' and half on the 'helpfulness' of that student's comments. The consistency score accounts for whether a student is differentiating among papers - if a student gives all high scores or all low scores, or if a student's scores differ from the other scores for the same papers, then the consistency score will be reduced (this also affects how much weight that student's scores are given in the writing score of the reviewed papers). The helpfulness score comes from 'back evaluations' that reviewees complete. The back evaluations are numeric scores on a five-point scale...

The short answer, for me, right now, is NO. However, I am not sure if that is because of an inherent problem with peer reviewing in SWoRD or it it is because of something about my assignments or my rubric. And to be fair, I have only had completed one full cycle (two drafts of a paper) in SWoRD so students are also still getting used to the system (if you missed it, I discussed the basics of SWoRD in my last post ). [Update: for my post-semester thoughts, and clarification of the grading, see my August follow-up post ] Some background: the first assignment (copy can be found here ) was for students to write a very short (300 words + graph) data summary, based on the latest BLS Unemployment Situation report. I had comment prompts and rubrics related to three general categories: economic content, the graphic and the writing. One thing I realized is that I probably had too many prompts (there were 9 total to go with the 3 rubrics) so for future assignments, I will condense them. I only...

As I mentioned , I'm using SWoRD in my writing class for econ majors. SWoRD is a site that not only facilitates peer review, it allows for student grades to actually be determined by their classmates' reviews. For each assignment, the instructor creates both open-ended comment prompts and a numeric rubric (the SWoRD template requires a 1 to 7 scale, though you can sort of get around that by skipping some of the numbers). Students submit their papers to SWoRD and once the deadline has passed, papers are assigned to peer reviewers (minimum of three, maximum of six; the creators of SWoRD strongly recommend at least five reviews if the scores will be used for grading). Everything is anonymous, as each student creates a pseudonym within the system (you just have to make sure students don't put their names in the text of their files!). I can either assign specific reviewers or have the system automatically assign them randomly. After the reviews are completed, the authors have t...