Think Globally,Teach Locally: Experiencing the Foreign Aid Debate Through Service Learning

Abstract

Novel curricular strategies are required if institutions want all students to actively experience the benefits of global knowledge and civic engagement, as financial and practical commitments frequently make study abroad inaccessible to many students. In this paper, we outline an innovative service-learning course, where local action coupled with an international target, offered a parallel and novel learning strategy that capitalized on the strengths of experiential education, while providing a practical and more inclusive student engagement opportunity available to a larger subset of students. We also describe our teaching strategy, which emphasizes the social context of the classroom: discovery, self-exploration, and shared learning. Together, service learning and a critical pedagogy can better help students relate to the otherwise abstract processes of foreign aid. In 2013 and 2014, approximately 30 undergraduate students participated in a student-led outreach project soliciting bicycle donations to support human development efforts in Uganda and Ghana. In addition to making reasonable progress toward learning outcomes during the two-year pilot, we found that the everyday challenges our students encountered in their service-learning project were microcosms for some of the large-scale, global challenges that foreign aid delivery faces.     

Learning to do: Facilitating practice in a large introductory macroeconomics class

Contemporary pedagogy encourages instructors to move away from memorization to teaching the ability to “do economics.” In such an environment, students are taught to apply knowledge of economic measurement, the economic model, and economic policy to analyze current events and policies. In this article, the authors build on existing literature describing independent activities by sharing a set of class exercises and assignments that comprise an entire course. The course discussed in this article is a large enrollment introductory course and presents a novel approach to active learning, adapted to this often-challenging context. The course emphasizes engaging students by encouraging them to practice using macroeconomic tools.     

Preparing Graduate Students in Economics for Teaching: Survey Findings and Recommendations

Survey data from PhD-granting economics departments are used to assess the teaching preparation of graduate students in economics. The results show that relatively few departments require graduate student instructors to take a credit course in teaching before teaching their own course or leading a recitation section. Although more graduate student instructors are required to take a noncredit course in teaching before serving as an instructor or recitation leader, the value of such noncredit courses may be limited. The assessment of teaching preparation by department chairs shows mixed responses, with about three-fifths rating it as very good or good and about two-fifths considering it to be only adequate or poor. Recommendations are offered for improving the teaching preparation of graduate student instructors in economics.     

‘Economics with Training Wheels’: Using Blogs in Teaching and Assessing Introductory Economics

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. The author of this article describes and evaluates a blog assignment used in the teaching and assessment of a small (40–60 students) introductory economics course. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected across four semesters, students’ participation in the blog assignment is found to be associated with student ability, gender, and student perceptions of the blog. Importantly, students with past economics experience do not appear to crowd out novice economics students. Student performance is positively associated with the quality of their blog participation after controlling for student ability, suggesting that a focus on quality of student engagement could further improve learning outcomes. Students generally report overall positive experiences with the blog assignment.     

Online Teaching Resources: A New Journal Section

Most economics departments use end-of-term student evaluations of teaching, but the relationship between instructors' assessments of their own teaching and their students' assessments is unknown. The background survey for the nationally normed Test of Understanding in College Economics asked students and instructors to evaluate the instructor on five identical items. Using these data, the authors found that for instructors who speak English as their native language, speaking ability and enthusiasm are closely linked to self-ratings of teaching effectiveness. Students also value these traits but care more about instructors' preparation for class. Grading rigor is more important to students of instructors who speak English as a second language.     

A Student Learning Inventory for Economics Based on the Students' Experience of Learning: A Preliminary Study

The authors present the initial development of a student learning inventory (SLI) that is specific to economics. This approach, which is based on the student experience of learning (SEL) literature, emphasizes aspects of prior knowledge in the learning history of entering first-year students. Preliminary insights from a first SLI suggest that on entry to university, students show considerable variation in their perceptions of what economics is and what economists do. From the SEL perspective, such variation affects student learning. It is argued that continued development of an economic-specific SLI may result in a better understanding of students' learning engagement with economics and ultimately assist instructors in better understanding student learning difficulties and increase student success in first-year economics.     

Creating infographics to enhance student engagement and communication in health economics

In this article, the authors discuss and describe the implementation of and lessons learned from a course project centered on the creation of an infographic in a health economics course and an introduction to health research course. Students were asked to create a simple infographic about a particular topic, after researching and gathering data on that topic. The instructors observed how students synthesized information and data to tell a visual story with their infographic. This article adds to the limited literature regarding infographics in undergraduate instruction. An infographic offers faculty an opportunity to apply active learning strategies to enhance student engagement, retention of information, and communication skills.     

Are contingent instructors better teachers: evidence from a Chinese university

This paper evaluates the effects of contingent instructors on education outcomes in the context of higher education in developing countries. Exploiting the features of Chinese higher education system, we are able to exclude the confounding effects of student selection and heterogeneous marking standards. Although students of contingent instructors appear to perform as well as their fellow students taught by full-time instructors, we find the evidence that contingent instructors utilize lower marking standards, resulting an inflation of the scores of their students, which masks the negative impacts of their teaching. Our results suggest that contingent instructors have a significantly negative impact on education outcomes. While exposure to contingent instructors may affect the probability of students taking more challenging courses in the following term, the longer-term impacts on education outcomes are negligible.     

Developing and Implementing an Internet-Based Financial System Simulation Game

Thanks to the Internet and server-side technology such as Active Server Pages (ASP), faculty can develop, implement, and share interactive pedagogy easily and inexpensively. The Financial System Simulator (FSS) is an example of an interactive game that the author has developed. The FSS is an Internet-based, interactive teaching aid that introduces undergraduate students to the domestic and international consequences of monetary policy. Although simulators are common among computer-aided interactive learning devices in today's undergraduate economics curricula, the FSS is different from the others because it allows students, who represent nations, to interact with each other rather than with a computer. The exercise provides users with real-time outcomes based on their decisions, as well as the decisions of other students. According to student surveys, the game helped students understand monetary policy and kept students motivated and interested.     

The Case of the Missing Organizations: Co-operatives and the Textbooks

The author discusses the following seven issues affecting assessment of undergraduates in universities: decisionmaking and the selection of tests, the use of written and oral assignments to measure learning, the characteristics of grades and portfolios for evaluating students, opportunities for self-assessment and feedback to instructors, retention of learning and the testing for higher-ordered thinking, the psychology of students in the economics classroom, and the development of new tests as public goods. The author suggests ways that economics faculty can add new dimensions to their assessment practices, improve their understanding of assessment choices, use assessment to enhance the quality of student thinking, and conduct research studies on assessment questions.     

A Survey of Principles Instructors: Why Lecture Prevails

For many years, surveys have shown that lecture is the dominant method for teaching principles of economics (Watts and Schaur 2011; Watts and Becker 2008; Becker and Watts 1996, 2001a, b). The authors confirm this and augment it by asking why principles instructors teach the way they do. The respondents, 340 principles instructors at the 2012 Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) conference, group into thirds: one-third saying that students learn best from lecture; another third reporting that students do not learn best from lecture, but it is cost-effective; and the rest answering that students do not learn best from lecture, so alternatives are preferred. Lecture advocates often cite the inputs and costs of teaching while advocates of alternatives often cite student outcomes.     

What is the Comparative Advantage of the Service Learning Pedagogy? Insights from Development Economics

We rely on the Kolb learning cycle and the experiences from two development economics class to analyze the comparative advantage of service learning pedagogy. We hypothesize that service learning is uniquely positioned to improve learning outcomes in applied/policy-oriented specializations. We conceptualize learning outcomes from a discipline-specific perspective where service hours are directly linked to the course content. We argue that the sustainability of service learning in applied/policy-oriented disciplines is limited by journal-entry orthodoxy and short-term costs. Emotive journal entries often encourage an “everything goes” response which threatens the credibility of service learning and limits its use in specializations that value objectivity. Service hours imply costs to faculty and students that exceed those of traditional approaches. This can serve as a disincentive for course adaptation, despite the decline in these costs over time, and enrollment. Our analysis encourages instructors to explore alternatives to the widely used journal-entry and to seek opportunities to inform students of the expected long-run benefit/cost tradeoffs. We encourage administrators to support faculty who teach classes that are predisposed to service learning in ways that can reduce short-run costs. With its comparative advantage and the united efforts across the academy, we expect that in the long-run service experiences will routinely be used to complement traditional lectures in applied/policy-oriented classrooms across the academy.     

Pretesting students to improve teaching and learning

The focus of this paper is on developing ways to evaluate teaching performance on a regular basis as a means of improving teaching effectiveness and increasing student learning in the classroom. In particular, this paper shows how an instructor-developed pretest, when given at the start of an introductory economics course as part of a pre- and post-test strategy, can be used as a diagnostic and developmental tool for instructors to assess and improve teaching effectiveness. Evidence of students' deficiencies in basic economic and math or graphing skills has led to making changes in content and delivery to increase students' chances of success in the economics course. In addition, pre- and post-test results can be used to determine which economic concepts are being taught effectively and which areas need improvement.     

The Relative Effectiveness of Three Methods of Teaching Principles of Economics

Research on the impact of learning style preferences is very rare in economic education. This article reports the results of a project in which the student's preferred learning style and the instructor's teaching style were included as variables in a regression model. Those favoring independent styles achieved significantly more than students favoring dependent styles. Changes in student attitudes towards economics were also taken into account. The researchers assert that the addition of these variables also “greatly increases the power of the model to explain variation in student achievement and attitudes concerning economics.”     

A Comment on “Grade Inflation: A Way Out”

The authors develop an original measure of learning in higher education, based on grades in subsequent courses. Using this measure of learning, they show that student evaluations are positively related to current grades but unrelated to learning once current grades are controlled. They offer evidence that the weak relationship between learning and student evaluations arises, in part, because students are unaware of how much they have learned in a course. They conclude with a discussion of easily implemented, optimal methods for evaluating teaching.     

Teacher Effectiveness and Student Performance

This paper evaluates the effects of using graduate student instructors rather than regular faculty in a macro course. Experienced faculty presumably have a positive effect on student performance, yet graduate instructors appear to be as effective in teaching macro principles. What may be involved are different sets of skills: experienced faculty may have a greater depth of understanding of the material, more self-confidence, and a more critical approach. Graduate instructorS, on the other hand, may be able to grasp what students don't understand, and may make up in enthusiasm and approachability what they lack in understanding.

The author urges using more than one measure of effectiveness in studies of this type because of many things not captured: excitement with the subject, caution in accepting unsupported arguments, a perspective on the economic system, and the like.     

Impostors in the Temple,by Martin Anderson

The Teaching Innovations Program (TIP) was a six-year project funded by the National Science Foundation that gave economics instructors the opportunity to learn interactive teaching strategies for use in undergraduate economics courses. TIP participants first attended a teaching workshop that presented various teaching strategies. They then could enroll in a follow-up program of online instruction and mentoring to learn more about one or two teaching strategies. TIP participants also had the opportunity to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning economics to share their work. A retrospective survey was administered to the participants after attending the program to obtain a longitudinal assessment of TIP. This article presents the overall survey findings and discusses the results from each TIP phase (workshop, online instruction, and scholarship).     

高校思想政治理论课教学中两种视角的转换

思想政治理论教学的最终目的,不是传授一套抽象的理论化知识体系,而是提高学生的政治素养和道德行为能力。当前,在高校思想政治理论教学中,由于偏重于宏观视角下的理论教育和知识学习,缺乏微观视角下的个体认知和情感培养,结果容易导致学生政治理论知识学习与提高实际政治素养和道德行为能力的脱节。这就有必要在思想政治理论课教学中辩证运用宏观视角和微观视角,在帮助学生获得抽象政治理论知识的同时,也促进其个体情感的丰富和道德敏感性的增强,最终有助于提高学生在社会实践中的政治素养和道德行为能力。     

Writing in the discipline and reproducible methods: A process-oriented approach to teaching empirical undergraduate economics research

The authors of this article describe an empirical research project as a component of an upper-level undergraduate economics writing-in-the-discipline course, thus aiming to reduce the high fixed costs associated with designing an empirical research project assignment and encourage more undergraduate economics research. This project is central to the course structure and has a dual-purpose: to teach students economics writing conventions and reproducible empirical research methods. The authors present a sequenced project design and replication documentation protocol and posit that this promotes student learning and leads to improvements in organization and coherence throughout the entire research and writing process. As an essential element of the course, students learn to do econometrics through effective writing, data management, and empirical analysis.     

土木工程专业混凝土结构设计原理课程双语教学实践与体会——回顾与反思

大学实行双语教学是我国高等教育教学改革的方向之一,是培养在各个领域走出国门参与国际竞争的“复合型”高素质的人才基地。作者分剐在几所不同的大学根据学生的不同情况,采用不同的双语教学模式讲授土木工程专业课程“混凝土结构设计原理”,发现用双语教学讲授专业课程的模式对学生来说是一把双刃剑,如果在课程设置、教材准备、教学安排和师资配备不做精心和系统地安排,仅凭一门课程单兵推进,欲速则达不到预期的效果,甚至天折;只有充分调动学生的学习主动性和积极性,部分专业课或全部专业课程循序渐进,逐步同时展开,才有可能获得预期的双语教学效果,学生的素质才会有在掌握专业基础知识的同时,极大地提高英语的学习、应用和思维能力。