Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In class last week, I did an activity with the students that demonstrated free-riding. Students are given a hypothetical dollar and have the option of keeping their dollar or contributing to the Public Account. For each dollar in the Public Account, everyone in the class receives some amount (I use $0.10 in the big class). So, for example, if 100 students contribute to the Public Account, everyone gets $10: anyone who contributed would have $10 but those who kept their dollar would have $11. We do several rounds, with some discussion at various points, and to give students incentive to think about maximizing their 'profit', I give them bonus points equal to some percentage of their total earnings. As expected, some students free-ride; in my class, there were about 75% who contributed to the Public Account in the first round but that quickly dropped to 50% in the second round, about 30% in the third round and about 15% in the fourth round. At that point, we had some discussio...

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...

Just got back from a super-productive workshop for folks working on modules for the Starting Point project . If you are not yet familiar with the Starting Point site, you definitely need to go check it out! The site "introduces economists to innovative teaching strategies developed both within and beyond the discipline of economics. It provide instructors with the tools to begin integrating and assessing these teaching strategies in their own classrooms and promotes the sharing of teaching innovations among instructors." Right now, there are three modules available ( context-rich problems , teaching with cases and cooperative learning ) but six more will be available in a few weeks (on classroom response systems, experiments, demonstrations, quantitative writing, computer simulations and undergraduate student research) and the rest (including the one I'm working on, on Interactive Lectures) should be live by the fall. The big idea behind Starting Point is that there ar...

One of the side effects of actually caring about teaching is that when I come across something that I think will be useful for my students, I really want to implement it NOW. But combine this with a full plate of research, service and (an attempt at) a personal life, and there simply are times when I have to accept that what I am already doing is 'good enough' and I need to wait until next time around to add in whatever it is I want to do. I'm struggling with this right now because I've been working what feels like around the clock for the last couple weeks and I know I need to let some things go. But I also recently picked up Joseph Williams' Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace and it has me wanting to completely re-vamp my writing class. This is an amazing little book! One of the things I really struggle with in teaching a writing class is that even when students can see that something they have written is not all that clear, I don't know how to help them ...

In the Principles class, when I start the section on the structure of the tax system, I always ask students if they believe taxes are "too high, too low or about right". The majority always answer "too high". After reading a recent article by Bruce Bartlett [hat tip to Mark Thoma ] I'm now tempted to ask them more specific questions about their beliefs about taxes and the size of government, since Bartlett has done the work of finding the answers for me. I don't usually do such extended quotes but this is great stuff (I should also mention that the responses from the Tea Partyers are exactly why I think we need to teach this stuff in Principles): Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data , acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Securit...

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had to explain to my writing class why economists do specification checks (we've been reading some empirical journal articles) and how many of the students are not really familiar with the process that economists go through when we write empirical papers. I think that part of what is hard for students to grasp is the constant questioning we do (and this is true not only for economists, but anyone who does research). As an empirical economist, I'm always asking: does my model make sense? What else, other than the variables I'm focusing on, could be driving my results? Can I get data on those other variables? Is this really causation, or just correlation? Given that I will be teaching a data and statistics course next semester , I've been thinking about how I am going to teach students to ask similar questions. With that in mind, I thought a recent Freakonomics post was a great example of this process. Eric Morris has had a bunch ...

I'm off to a conference this week (is it really going to be warmer in Richmond, VA than in San Diego by Friday?!?) so thought I'd just share a few links that I've been meaning to write more about... Dan Hamermesh points out two examples of externalities on airplanes . As one commenter notes, I'm waiting for rules about crying babies... If you don't read Jodi Beggs' blog already, Economists Do It with Models , you really should. Two recent posts I particularly liked were on the stupidity of charging for 911 calls (with an excellent explanation of public goods and common resources) and the opportunity cost of weddings (though that one's by a guest poster). The New York Times Magazine had an outstanding piece on teaching that I really want to write more about but in the meantime, just go read it !