Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I seem to have a lot of friends with two kids and at some point, every single one has said something about how different their kids are from each other - one is shy and the other is an attention-monger, or one will eat anything and the other is incredibly picky, or one seems to have been born reading and the other can't be bothered, etc. It doesn't seem to be a boy/girl thing or older/younger thing; the kids are just different for no reason that the parents can remotely explain. I'm mentioning this because there have been several times this semester when I have thought that the same goes for classes. All of my classes have a distinct 'personality' that I can't seem to explain. Last semester, it was a lot harder to get anyone in my 11am class to speak up, compared to my 2pm class (and the difference in engagement was reflected in the average grades). The two classes always covered the same material, the teams worked on the exact same application problems, so I ...

I teach in a department where the full-time tenure/tenure-track faculty is 43 percent female (6 out of 14); it's an even 50 percent among tenured associate (2 out of 4) and full (4 out of 8) professors (for anyone following the math, that leaves 2 assistant professors, both male). For any non-economists reading this, those percentages are highly unusual, even for a non-Ph.D.-granting institution. According to the 2010 Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (full disclosure: I'm on the Board), at Ph.D.-granting institutions, only 10.7% of full professors and 21.8% of tenured associate professors are women; at liberal arts institutions, those numbers are 25% and 32.7%, respectively. I also work in a sub-field (economics of education) that tends to have a lot of women, both economists and non-economists. And I spend a lot of time thinking about, and talking to people about, teaching economics, which tends to be an area that attracts relatively...

For those who were not able to participate personally in the AEA's Teaching Innovations Program (TIP), you can still get a taste of the project through a new book, Teaching Innovations in Economics: Strategies and Applications for Interactive Instruction . The first few chapters talk about the program itself and then there is a chapter on each of the interactive strategies that TIP focused on, i.e., cooperative learning, classroom experiments, interpretive discussion, formative assessment, context-rich problem solving, teaching with cases, and active learning in large-enrollment courses (full disclosure: I'm a contributor to one of the chapters - take a wild guess which one!). There are tons of good ideas, with solid advice from people who have implemented the techniques themselves. I also just got a notice that the paperback version of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates is coming out in May. I haven't read it yet but just have to give props to a book...

[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...

I am tempted to apologize for my blogging absence but I trust that anyone reading this will understand when I say that it has simply been "one of those semesters." As I said to someone recently: so far, I'm managing to stay on top of things but just barely so I feel like if I stop for a second, I'll fall behind. But I just got a couple projects off my plate so I'm feeling good and at least wanted to let everyone know what's been going on here. One of the things that made the start of the semester busier than usual is that I am part of not one but TWO IT pilot projects. One is for PollEverywhere , which I've mentioned before ; the other is for SWoRD , which stands for Scaffolded Writing and Reviewing in the Disciplines. I'm using PollEverywhere in my data analysis course, in place of clickers, while SWoRD is a peer reviewing system that I'm using with my writing course for econ majors. I'll be writing more about my experience with each of them...