Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I've posted several links over the last couple months on the blog's Facebook and Twitter feeds - for those who do not follow the blog through those feeds, here's a round-up of those links: The First Day of Class: A Once-a-Semester Opportunity In search of a drought strategy, California looks down under - NPR story that discusses the water version of cap and trade From the Archives: Getting ready for the new semester - great collection of posts from ProfHacker Making the most of the syllabus - how do you get students to read the syllabus? Professor offers best advice for college freshman - share with your students! What fitness bands can teach us about classroom assessment   The Learning Curve: Dropping knowledge on dropout rates - if you teach quantitative literacy, education policy provides a ton of good examples Do student evaluations of teaching really get an "F"? - an important response to the media hype about SETs Everything you ever wanted to...

Amazon’s explanation of their dealings with Hachette provide a great, highly-specific example of the connection between elasticity and total revenue. You could ask students to use the provided data to calculate what Amazon thinks is the price-elasticity of demand for e-books. In addition, this InsideHigherEd post raises some good points about substitutes and pricing strategies across books. All Things Considered aired a story this week entitled “Why are theater tickets cheaper on the West End than on Broadway?” In discussing the price difference between tickets in New York and London, the story touches on multiple economic concepts, including economies of scale, product differentiation, price discrimination, subsidies and substitutes. The next time your students ask you what they can do with an economics degree, you may want to share this article with them. It’s about how economists are increasingly being hired by tech companies to talk data and PR to customers and the media. I ...

One common challenge for instructors new to interactive teaching is deciding exactly what to do . From one perspective, there are tons of resources available (like all those listed on my ‘Resources for Teachers’ page ), providing ideas about what to do and guidance on how to do it. But almost all of those resources are organized around pedagogy; for example, From ABBA to Zeppelin has great examples of song lyrics that can be used to teach economic concepts, Games Economists Play catalogs lots of ‘experiments’, and the Starting Point portal is organized by pedagogical tool (clickers, simulations, context-rich problems, etc.). But for folks who don’t already use these tools, how do you know which site to go to in the first place? Many economists don’t think much about pedagogy, let alone think about it first. Instead, most people start with the content they know they want to ‘cover’ and then they think about how they are going to teach it. Once you are on a site like Games Economis...

Part Two of my  Teach Me Econ podcast  conversation is now available. One thing James and I talked about in Part One of our conversation was using history as a ‘hook’ for getting more future social science teachers interested in economics. Then along comes a Weakonomics post about “ Eight economic things you don’t know about the pre-civil war south and slavery ” that provides a great place to start. In addition to an awesome “Primer for New Teachers of Economics” in the current issue (ungated version available on my personal website ), the Southern Economic Journal has a forthcoming article on “ Targeting Teaching Using ESPN 30 for 30 to Teach Economics ”.

In my last post , I walked through how I make videos to go with songs that I play as students enter class. A lot of times, I just play the songs/videos and then proceed with class; the songs are really just a way to get students thinking about how economics relates to many aspects of their lives that they may not be aware of (plus, the end of the music signals to students that class is about to start, which was a particularly big help when I was teaching the 500-seat section). But songs (and movie or TV clips) can also be useful springboards for in-class assignments. All of the resources out there that have suggestions for media clips in economics (like  Music for Econ ,  Movies for Econ , or  The Economics of Seinfeld ) will identify which economic concepts the clips address and have at least a short summary of what’s in the clip. A couple ( ABBA to Zeppelin and Dirk’s site ) also provide some specific follow-up questions that instructors could use in class. I thought...

Many readers of this blog are familiar with the idea of having music playing as students come into class each day. Just browsing through sites like ABBA to Zeppelin or Dirk Mateer’s media library will give you tons of ideas for songs with lyrics that relate to economic concepts. But for many of those songs, the economic references might be a little obscure. Sure, if you’re playing a song with the word “Money” in the title, students are going to get that there’s some sort of connection to economics but when you play a song like “Big Yellow Taxi” or “Soak Up the Sun”, chances are they’ll think you’re just playing random music and not realize it has anything to do with what they are learning. One way to make the connection clear is to use videos/animations that spell it out. This is why I’m a huge fan of Brian O’Roark’s Music for Econ videos. He created a bunch of flash files that show the lyrics for each song and also have images and text that highlight the economic concepts. When ...

Last month, I had a conversation with James Tierney for his Teach Me Econ podcast series. We ended up talking for over an hour so he broke it up into two parts and the first one is now posted . In this one, we talk a lot about economics at the K-12 level. The Council for Economic Education has a neat site, This Day in Economic History , that provides information on past events related to economics and personal finance (with related lesson plans for high school and Principles-level classes). Example: For February 6, 1919: "A five day strike involving around 60,000 Seattle union laborers, which basically shutdown the city, comes to a long awaited end." The AEA has posted webcasts of several sessions from the January meetings. They are a bit long but could be good discussion starters in any macro class. Antony Davies has a series of short videos covering a wide range of topics. These are ‘talking head’ lectures (i.e., just a video of a typical lecture) but focused and sho...

The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes. Mark Maier and I have set up a  site and blog  to accompany our book,  The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics . In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out! James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang , the author of the latest edition of the Cor...

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 !)

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 ...

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.

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...

A story on NPR caught my ear the other night - it was about how San Diego used to be the country's top supplier of avocados but producers here are facing increased costs for water and labor, and increased competition from other countries. What really caught my attention was the very end of the story: "Ironically, 2011 was the best year ever for San Diego avocado growers. High market prices pushed the monetary value of the crop up, even as the acreage shrank." This isn't as bad as some examples I've seen but to some, it could sound like the speaker is suggesting that the higher prices are somehow surprising or inconsistent with acreage shrinking. This would be a great example to have students show, using a supply and demand graph, how the higher prices are exactly what we should expect, because of the shrinking supply.

As we all recover from turkey overload, here are some sites to check out when you feel like escaping the end-of-semester madness... PNC's 2011 Christmas Price Index is out! The site has gotten a lot more complex and makes you go through a bunch of screens sequentially to get to the total - that's great if you want to waste some time but I couldn't find any way to just jump to the punchline, which is actually kind of annoying, so for those who are as impatient as I am, the total cost is $24,263.18, up 3.5% from last year. The always-awesome Dirk Mateer has a new website . In Dirk's words: "I created this site to act as a "virtual personal assistant" for all Econ professors and TAs, allowing you to easily find engaging pop culture clips and real world examples that will help bring the material to life for your students in a way they can relate to!" You can also follow Dirk on twitter (@dirkmateer) or Facebook . My colleague, and founding editor o...