I primarily use Aplia to do experiments, rather than problem sets. When I started teaching the 500-seater, one thing I knew was that I didn't want to give up activities like having students participate in a market auction but I couldn't imagine how that would work in class so I adopted Aplia.Well, as I mentioned a while ago, there were a couple of presentations at the TIP conference in January that downright inspired me and one was by Jose Vazquez-Cognet, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who discussed the double-oral auction that he does with his class of 800. To be clear, he does this in class, not using Aplia or some other computer simulator - he actually has 800 students milling around, trying to buy and sell from each other! I would never have imagined trying this in such a large class but listening to him explain what he does, it actually does sound do-able. One thing that helps is he creates smaller trading pits within the room: students can trade with those in their immediate area but they can't go running around to the other side of the room. He also has figured out a way to have students switch roles, from buyer to seller or vice versa, without having to pass out new information sheets. I'm sticking with Aplia this semester but am definitely tempted to give it a try next semester...
As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do...
Have you ever seen anybody use clickers to conduct an in-class auction (or any other type of experiment, for that matter)?
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