Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

For me, the biggest challenge of using clickers is coming up with good questions. I have never liked multiple-choice questions, partly because as a student, I always thought multiple-choice was WAY easier than open-ended. This is largely because, for many questions, it is really hard to come up with good 'wrong' answers. When I started teaching the 500-seater, I took a lot of questions from test banks but always felt I needed to change something so they wouldn't be so easy. But it's often been hard for me to tell ahead of time which questions would be good for peer instruction, i.e., that would generate a mixed distribution of answers the first time asked. Over time, I've used the answer distribution on exam questions to find these questions; that is, if a high percentage of students answer a question incorrectly on an exam, I think it's safe to assume I'll get a similar (or worse) distribution if I ask it as a clicker question in class the next semester (o...

At the TIP workshop , one of the first activities was for us to discuss what we consider the most important thing professors can do to facilitate student learning (which we then had to demonstrate through some sort of presentation but that's a whole 'nother story). In my group, we started out with an interesting discussion about whether 'being organized' is the most important thing a professor can do to facilitate student learning. I argued that there are certain things that are sort of a baseline for student learning - to me, being organized and knowing what you're talking about are prerequisites for stepping into any classroom. And I do think that if you aren't organized, students won't be able to learn. But I think of being organized as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for student learning. Plenty of people deliver content in an organized way; that does not mean students will learn. My group agreed on 'making material relevant' as the id...

My department is beginning to talk about writing new questions for our teaching evaluations. One of my colleagues wants to only ask 'objective' questions, such as whether professors are in their office when they say they will be, whether they were on time (or even present) for classes, etc. His reasoning is that faculty can control whether they are doing a "professional" job (his word, not mine) but we can't control what our students do. As he put it (and I quote): "The problem with measuring how much students are learning is that there is an implicit assumption that we are responsible for how much they learn. The responsibility is both ours and theirs, yet we don't ask questions about how responsible they are being." On one level, I can understand where he's coming from. On the other hand, my personal philosophy was pretty much summed up by Scott at Dangerously Irrelevant in a recent post that was succinct but powerful: Two problematic beliefs ...

I've spent a lot of time this week writing exams. I give my Principles students three midterms, with the third one falling on the next-to-last class (which would be this coming Wednesday). Then I use the last class meeting to review everything from the semester in preparation for the cumulative final; in other words, I try to remind them of everything they've learned, which I hate to say, usually ends up being sort of a laundry list of concepts. I'm still working on a better way to review "everything"... I know that many of my students hate my exams - I suppose that they would say I try to "trick" them. That's because for many questions, I purposely try to make one of the wrong answers something that will seem right to students who only have a superficial understanding of the material. I talk to a lot of students who do worse on my exams than they thought and when they see the correct answers, they say, "Oh, that's the other answer I was thi...

As I've been working on bringing more Web 2.0 tools into my classes, I have frequently wondered how much is too much? I know that my students are supposedly 'digital natives' but I also know that they are not all as cutting-edge tech savvy as we old fogies sometimes assume. For my intro Principles class, students have to maneuver Blackboard (including using discussion boards), Aplia (a private third-party website that provides online problems and experiments for econ classes), an online textbook available through Aplia, clickers , PowerPoint slides and podcasts. In addition, I'm very likely going to be participating in a pilot program to capture my lectures so those will be on iTunes U as well (though students will certainly not be required to watch them - they will just be available as an extra resource). I'm also thinking about using Twitter as an option for students to get reminders and to ask questions in class (also not required but just an extra resource) but ...

A couple articles about 'clickers' on InsideHigherEd have evoked some strong responses ( here and here ). Among the comments, there seem to be three strands: those that love them, those that hate them, and those that think they are a useful tool but recognize that they are just a tool. Since I'm in the last category, I particularly liked a comment from Peg Wherry: Good teaching is good teaching, regardless of class size or tools available. But some tools let you do different things or even the same things in more productive ways. Certainly, part of the push-back on clickers is because some administrators want to use clickers (and other technology) as an excuse for increasing class sizes. That is, there are some who would like to believe that the reduction in educational quality created by forcing students into huge lectures can be offset by using these tools to foster greater interaction. To a certain extent, I actually agree - I definitely think that if you are going to t...

Somewhat related to my struggle to trust my students is my interest in intrinsic versus extrinsic incentives. Economistmom wrote a post about handling her daughter's allowance, which led me to comment that when I was growing up, my mom always said that our allowances were not 'payment' for doing household chores, we were supposed to do chores simply because it was our responsibility as members of the family. Tyler Cowen makes a similar point in Discover Your Inner Economist , arguing that if you pay your kids to do stuff that it can actually be a weaker incentive than relying on their sense of familial duty. But on the other hand, the ed policy world was buzzing a few weeks ago when New York City received a prestigious award for its "Million" Campaign, in which students receive cell phones and prizes as rewards for academic achievement. On the face of it, I wasn't thrilled when I first heard about the Million Campaign, precisely because I'm skeptical th...

I have many objections to super-large lecture sections (which, unfortunately, are my University’s response to higher student enrollments) but probably my biggest gripe is that they provide a huge disincentive to have students write. Even with masters-level teaching assistants, and even if papers are short, I don’t think any but the most masochistic professors would want to deal with grading for that many students. But one of the reasons that I have become so interested in Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis is that they have the potential to get students writing, but without the need for me to monitor every word. So for my 500-seat Principles of Micro class this fall, I plan to give students the option to write blogs or participate in discussion boards. Given the size of the class, my thought is that I will give students a choice of four semester projects: one option will be volunteering for Junior Achievement, one involves participating in a class blog about economics around the web/in...

As I was looking for more information about Clay Shirky , I found his Here Comes Everybody blog . A post from April contains a 'lightly edited transcription' of a speech in which Shirky mentions the resistance of many in the media world to the new Web 2.0 world: This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. When I read that, I immediately thought about how similar that sounds to much of the conversations in the teaching and learning community about the move toward more student-centered learning. Like traditional media folks, many teachers don't really understand this new world bec...

I've been plugging away with prepping my Economics for Teachers course, trying to figure out what is most important to cover, the best sequence in which to present certain ideas, and generally getting completely side-tracked as I find great articles and websites addressing different aspects of teaching economics. Since this is an entirely new course, I don't have many of the usual tools for guiding my decisions; that is, when I have prepped other courses for the first time, I have always had the syllabi of others who had taught the course before, as well as textbooks, instructor manuals and other aids from publishers. But in this case, the only such help I have is William Becker's syllabus for a Teaching Economics to Undergraduates course aimed at econ grad students. That's certainly been helpful but only up to a point, since I'll be teaching undergrads who will someday be teaching high school students and who are, for the most part, not even econ majors. So basic...