Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

[Today (July 31) is the last day to complete the  blog reader survey  if you want to be included in the drawing for a free copy of  The Intl Handlbook on Teaching and Learning Economics . Thank you!] My last post outlined the basic structure of TBL. That structure can be summarized as a) students acquire basic concepts  on their own, b) students are assessed to make sure they actually have acquired those concepts, c) class time is spent on application exercises that require they use that basic knowledge in more complex ways, and d) students assess their teammates and those evaluations are used to 'weight' the team portion of each individual's final grade. In this post, I'll talk about the first stages of the cycle, where students acquire basic concepts and are assessed on those. Although there has been a lot of discussion recently about 'flipped classrooms', I'm wary of pushing too much content acquisition outside the classroom in classes like micro ...

[If you haven't completed the blog reader survey yet, please take a few minutes to do so (before July 31 if you want to be included in the drawing for a free copy of The Intl Handlbook on Teaching and Learning Economics ). Thank you!] Although I know I've mentioned the fact that I use Team-Based Learning (TBL) in my data analysis class, I can't believe I haven't written a series of posts yet to really explain what I'm doing and how it's working. So here we go... Keep in mind that the class is called Collection and Use of Data in Economics (if anyone's interested, you can get the syllabus here ); it is an upper-division required course for all econ majors and they must have already taken Principles (both 101 and 102), lower-division statistics, and an Information Systems course that covers Excel and databases. For those who know nothing about TBL, the basic idea is that students spend the majority of class time working in permanent teams (i.e., they k...

At the beginning of every semester, I have my students fill out an information sheet where I gather some basic background, like their major, hometown, other econ courses, personal interests, etc. I feel like I can be more effective if I know something about who they all are. Here on the blog, I have sometimes struggled as I write posts because  I don't really have a good idea of who is reading what I write. I mean, I have a general idea - I assume you all are somehow interested in economics and/or teaching (well, aside from my mom :-)) - but that's about all I really know. It finally dawned on me that I should just ask (duh!).  So, if you are a regular reader, will you please complete  this short survey ? By 'short', I mean it should take you about five minutes. I figured summer would be a good time to do this but I know that even for those few minutes, there are opportunity costs and some of you may need an extra incentive, so everyone who responds by July 31 will be e...

In the past, I have regularly used Discussion Boards (within the Blackboard LMS) to have students post reflections or questions related to assigned readings. But I've really only used the Discussion Board tool because there was no better alternative; I've never been a big fan of the interface. The threads just seem clunky and I don't think students actually read what other students post unless I specifically assign them to do so. So now that my university has updated to Blackboard 9, which has blogs, wikis and journals, I'm considering using one or more of these options instead. While wikis are specifically for collaborative creation of a common product, blogs and journals allow students to write individual posts or comments. From what I can tell, the main difference between Blackboard's blogs and journals seems to be that journals are intended to be private; students write entries that are only visible to the instructor (although there is an option to make the e...

Last year, I wrote a lot about my experience with SWoRD , a site that facilitates peer review of writing (including generating grades from peer review scores). Although I think there are a lot of neat things about SWoRD, there were also a lot of problems and I decided not to use it for the writing class this past spring. Instead, I used Turnitin's PeerMark tool, which is integrated into my school's Blackboard system. Compared to last year, I made a few adjustments to the writing and reviewing process. The general pattern was that students would submit first drafts on Mondays, by class time; those papers would be made available to reviewers at the end of a two-hour grace period (i.e., class started at 3:30pm and papers were available to reviewers at 5:30pm so slightly late papers could still get reviewed without messing up any of the assignments) and reviews were due by class time on Wednesday (again with a two-hour grace period). Depending on the assignment, students revi...

A friend is starting a new teaching position this fall and I put together some suggested readings and resources for her and then realized that readers here might want find it useful too. So here are some articles and other resources that might be helpful for anyone teaching "large" econ classes (I put "large" in quotes because it really is relative - in my department, "large" means hundreds but at other schools, classes of 50 are considered "large"). I will readily admit a huge bias here as I started with the papers/projects I've personally been involved in! Buckles, S., G. Hoyt and J.Imazeki (2012), "Making the large-enrollment course interactive and engaging," in K. McGoldrick and G. Hoyt (eds), International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics , pp. 118-128. Hoyt, G., J. Imazeki, M. Kassis and D. Vera (2010), "Interactive large enrollment economics classes," in M. K. Salemi and W. B. Walstad (eds), Teaching ...

On Tuesday, I got to spend the day learning about various aspects of assessment, at SDSU's One Day in May symposium.  So much good stuff! Although I think of myself as relatively savvy about a lot of tools, and a definite data junky, I got lots of ideas about things I could be doing to track analytics in Blackboard and Google Docs. I haven't been a huge Google Docs user so I had no clue that there are so many cool things you can do with spreadsheet gadgets (like create word clouds or interactive timelines, a la Gapminder ). The day got me thinking about how I could use certain tools and I started looking for new ways to deal with one of my most time-consuming tasks. I have a couple different situations where I collect information from students that I want to pass on to other students (e.g., team peer evaluations in the data class or reviewer back evaluations in the writing class). Currently, the way I do that is either through emailing each student or putting the informati...