College instructors and students participated in a pilot project at the University of Akron to enhance student learning through the use of a common teaching pedagogy, peer instruction. The teaching pedagogy was supported by the use of technology, an electronic personal response system, which recorded student responses. The authors report their…

The authors examined the effects of remedial mathematics on performance in university-level economics courses using a natural experiment. They studied exam results prior and subsequent to the implementation of a remedial mathematics course that was compulsory for a subset of students and unavailable for the others, controlling for background…

Microeconomic principles courses focus on perfectly competitive markets far more than other market structures. The authors examine five possible reasons for this but find none of them sufficiently compelling. They conclude that textbook authors should place more emphasis on how economists select appropriate models and test models' predictions…

The authors describe an in-class exercise in which students participate in an auction to buy US Airways. The exercise is based on events of late 1995, in which neither United nor American Airlines decided to bid for US Airways. Two teams of students participate in an English auction. Students learn that the equilibrium of the sequential game is…

The Solow model is widely regarded as the workhorse model of the theory of economic growth. Although at one point this model was first encountered in graduate school, it has since filtered down to the intermediate and, occasionally, to the principles of macroeconomics course. Many have commented on how difficult it is to teach the Solow model to…

A significant event for the advancement of economic education in the schools is the development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in economics. For the first time, national data from a representative sample of students are available to measure the achievement of high school students in economics. The achievement results are…

Trade, the Internet, and product innovation have greatly enlarged the number of goods (N) in the consumer's choice set. The welfare effect of the growth in N has been extensively discussed in the specialized literature, but very little has filtered down to our textbook models of a competitive equilibrium. These focus on the Pareto-optimal…

We examine the impact of class size on student evaluations of instructor performance using data on all economics classes offered at the University of California, Santa Barbara from Fall 1997 to Spring 2004. A particular strength of this data is the opportunity to control for both instructor and course fixed effects. In contrast to the literature…

This paper reports on the perceptions of teaching economists of the nature, implementation and result of outcomes assessment/assurance of learning (AOL) in higher education. The results reported in the paper are based on over eight hundred responses to a web-based survey of teaching economists. While there is little consensus among economists…

Scope and Method of Study: This study develops, implements, and evaluates a new economics teaching pedagogy based on the U.S. Army's systems approach to training model. Using the approach, tasks are identified that compose the task domain for the Principles of Microeconomics course. From the 130 identified tasks, 73 are used by Economics of…

"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) Teacher Assessment (Mary Sanchez); (2) Our Economics…

Authors of intermediate microeconomics textbooks devote relatively more space to imperfectly competitive markets than can be justified by their relative occurrence in actual markets. This gap has persisted for at least 40 years, even with an almost complete turnover of authors between the decades of the 1960s and the 2000s. This portrayal gives…

The authors review the graphical approach to teaching the real business cycle model introduced in Barro. They then look at where this approach cuts corners and suggest refinements. Finally, they compare graphical and exact models by means of impulse-response functions. The graphical models yield reliable qualitative results. Sizable quantitative…

Calibrated Peer Review[TM] (CPR) is a web-based instructional tool that encourages "writing gain for students" without adding "grading pain for the instructor!" The use of CPR provides students frequent opportunities to hone both writing as well as peer review skills in a guided environment. And once an assignment is authored, instructors have…

The choice of assignment types in a course is shown to have differential effect on performance of specific types of students. Using data from six semesters of college Economics classes, the study demonstrates that male and non-traditional students are more likely to have higher performance on multiple choice questions. Students whose major field…