A "Big Think" Approach to Teach Econ

This is an interesting paper by KimMarie McGoldrick & Robert Garnett [published here] on how to adopt a "big think approach" to teach economics principles, and it should work for other classes as well. See this excerpt from the conclusions:

The big think approach focuses on a key barrier to liberal education reform in undergraduate economics education, namely: the highly technical nature of economics Ph.D. programs. Many undergraduate instructors and programs profess to teach their students the art of critical thinking or “thinking for themselves” within the major; yet students’ demonstrated achievements do not support these lofty claims. The pedagogical norms of and supporting resources for undergraduate economics education remain heavily oriented to “little think” rather than “big think,” in part because the professional training of most Ph.D. economists leaves them unprepared to develop course materials consistent with a big think approach (Colander and McGoldrick 2009b). Our project aims to fill this gap by placing compelling, autodidactic tools in the hands of instructors who want their students to achieve liberal education outcomes but who have yet to find practical ways to integrate critical inquiry into their courses (p. 24).

The authors add

The big think approach is also not primarily concerned with debate or contending perspectives. It is not Crossfire or Taking Sides; and it is not “what’s wrong with economics.” It’s about learning to bridge the gap between the algorithmic certainty of economic theory and the untidiness and uncertainty of ill-structured applications. In terms of existing pedagogical models, big think might be described as a carefully crafted social issues approach to economic principles (Grimes 2009). As such, it offers potentially large benefits to our introductory economics students, the great majority of whom take only one course in economics – and our economics majors, 98% of whom who do not go to graduate school (Siegfried 2009: 222) (p. 10).

The article suggests using things like context-rich problems, connecting foundational knowledge with applications, and others. The authors give two examples that can work as templates for making that connection, one for microeconomics and the other for macro: one where the goal is to have students think and brainstorm on different pricing strategies in higher education, which is an issue they are very familiar with, and the other one based on the US government debt, an interesting issue in itself, and widely discussed these days. In the first topic for example students can apply concepts like price discrimination, elasticities, etc. The paper is worth reading carefully. Discussed it with your colleagues who teach econ principles classes. 

I am sure teachers in other countries can find interesting social issues for discussion. The topic of pricing in higher education can work well. For a macro class may be taxes and its effects or / and the informal economy should work. 

Teaching and Learning Economics in "The Age of Empires"

Initially the villagers can collect food only by hunting, gathering or fishing by the seashore. They can, however, use 150 units of wood to build a dock. It then becomes possible to create small fishing boats (for 75 units of wood each) that go fishing on their own, including in deeper water which villagers cannot reach without the boats. The building of the dock as well as the boats constitutes a first example of investing raw materials in creating capital, which then increases one’s productive capacity. Another interesting lesson introduced at this stage is the concept of diminishing returns. When too many villagers forage from a single bush, or when too many bring wood, stone or gold to the same storage camp, they often bump into one another, causing temporary delays. This is a classic example of diminishing marginal returns to labor given fixed capital, illustrated in an intuitive and self-explanatory way.

That is from this paper by Jacob Assa. The title is "The Age of Models: Economic Lessons in Real-Time Computer Strategy Games." 
Tyler Cowen talks here, among many other thins, about games as a tool to teach and learn econ.

Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average students and less-qualified students.

That is from this abstract of a paper by David N. Figlio, Morton Owen Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter . A related paper (2004) is here.  

Teaching econ with flowcharts

This is for the IS-LM model (which I am not a fan of), but the tool could work well for different macro (and micro) approaches:

Source: Reingewertz (2013).

Students' Evaluations

. . . [W]e find that our measure of teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students’ evaluations of professors: in other words, teachers who are associated with better subsequent performance receive worse evaluations from their students. We rationalize these results with a simple model where teachers can either engage in real teaching or in teaching-to-the-test, the former requiring greater student effort than the latter.

That is from the paper "Evaluating Students' Evaluations of Professors" by Braga, Paccagnella, and Pellizzari.

Teaching practices, social capital, and economic performance of students

Horizontal teaching practices, such as working in groups, seem to promote the formation of social capital, while vertical teaching practices, such as teachers lecturing, seem to discourage it.

That is from the new paper "Teaching Practices and Social Capital" by Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer.