Reminding Students About Their Academic Standing

In this article, the authors illustrate how incentives can improve student performance in introductory economics courses. They implemented a policy experiment in a large introductory economics class in which they reminded students who scored below an announced cutoff score on the midterm exam about the risk of failing the course. The authors employed a regression-discontinuity method to estimate the causal impact of their policy on students’ performance on the final exam. The results suggest that the policy had a significant impact on students’ performance on the final exam. In fact, the gain in test scores was sufficient to boost a student's overall course grade by one letter grade.

That is from this paper (gated) by Qihui Chen & Tade O. Okediji.

Using ‘Classic’ Articles in the Teaching of Undergraduate Economics

This paper describes how classic articles have been used to teach undergraduate economics in a first year introductory Macroeconomics class and a third year topics in Microeconomics class. The paper reviews the ‘standard’ approach to undergraduate economics education focusing on the use (or lack thereof) of ‘primary’ or ‘source’ materials; the philosophy of ‘classics’ based pedagogy (mainly focused on ‘liberal arts’ education) and its applicability to the teaching of economics; describes how source materials have been used by the author in university economics classes; and provides conclusions and recommendations for potentially greater use of assignment of source texts in economics at the baccalaureate level.

That is a very interesting approach. I took a graduate class on micro-economics at GMU that complemented the technical side with classic articles. It was fun. 
The article is by Cameron Gordon.

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. 

Using Economics Blogs to Teach Economic Principles

The proliferation of widely-read blogs in the social sciences presents a pedagogical opportunity for instructors of undergraduate courses. This paper describes the introduction of blog assignments by the authors in the fall of 2011 in five principles of microeconomics classes at Western Carolina University. Students were subsequently surveyed in order to assess the impact of blog assignments on their attitudes toward economics. The survey results indicate that the blog assignments appear to have stimulated student interest in economics, while also offering a number of advantages over traditional textbook-based homework assignments. In this paper, we make the case that blog assignments are an effective pedagogical tool in economics and should be similarly successful in other social science courses.

From a paper by James Ullmer & Stephen Miller.

Homework

In this article, the authors describe a field experiment in the classroom where principles of microeconomics students are randomly assigned into homework-required and not-required groups. The authors find that homework plays an important role in student learning, especially so for students who initially perform poorly in the course. Students in the homework-required group have higher retention rates, higher test scores (5 to 6 percent), more good grades (Bs), and lower failure rates. The authors also study the relationship between endogenous homework submission and test performance using instrumental variable estimation and find that homework submission has a large positive effect on test performance.

Source. Draft. 

In case you are writing an economics textbook

Some advice from Poul Thois Madsen on how to address the financial crisis:

• Reorganize the existing presentation in order to make the financial crisis fit better into the general presentation. 

• Try to handle the financial crisis theoretically, either by applying already existing concepts and theories, developing existing concepts and theories, or by introducing new concepts and theories.

• Discuss the underlying theoretical reasons as to why economists disagree on possible causes of, remedies for and economic and theoretical consequences of the financial crisis.

• Analyze the financial crisis in the light of previous financial crises. 

• Devote at least an entire chapter to financial crises and link it explicitly to the chapters before and after. 

• Apply the existing conceptual framework when presenting and analyzing the general changes in monetary and fiscal policy (what is being attempted by applying these policies and what are the effects to be expected?). 

• Discuss possible long-term effects of the financial crisis including a discussion on possible ways out of the crisis.

Source. 

The Tortoise and the Hare: A Case on Textbooks

 . . . learning could go faster if curricula and teachers were to slow down.

That is the conlcusion of this paper by Lant Pritchett & Amanda Beatty. I could not agree more. That also applies to a large extent to economics teaching in college in developed countries (see: Are we teaching too much?) 

What is the problem?

Probably the problem is a combination of too ambitious textbooks and equally ambitious professors. The new textbooks cover a lot of material and professors have the expectation that they need to teach all of it (I have in mind micro and macroeconomics textbooks). Young professors are more ambitious than older ones in terms of the material they want to cover. 

Experienced professors can teach us one or two things about how much to cover in an undergraduate class. They pick and choose, less experienced ones want to teach everything. 

In fact after careful consideration I decided not to use a required textbook for my principles of microeconomics class this semester (this is my recommended one). I will let you know how it goes. Basically I will use a set of handouts that a former professor of mine, Julio Cole, wrote. They cover the fundamental concepts, to the point. I will complement them with a chapter a day from Landsburg's new edition of The Armchair Economist, and we will analyze movies using economic concepts: Hunger Games, The Hobbit, Amistad, The Godfather, Moneyball, and City of God. 

Nowadays there are so many resources online, such as videos, podcasts, etc., that using a textbook is less and less important. In fact, in my econ classes at George Mason, we read mostly books, papers, and handouts; rarely textbooks . . . well, we had some, but we did not focus on them (granted, it was grad-school, but still). Even though we did not focus on textbooks there was a lot of fun and learning. I am not saying that textbooks are unnecessary, but probably they are overrated.