How Departments of Economics Evaluate Teaching

Based on results from a 1999 national survey, William Becker and Michael Watts found that student evaluations of teaching were by far the most widely used, and often the only method used by economics departments, to evaluate teaching in undergraduate economics courses. To investigate whether departments of economics have moved beyond the use of student evaluations of teaching, in 2011 the current authors conducted a national survey of departments based largely on questions used in the 1999 survey. The surveys included items on how courses and teaching are evaluated, and on how that information is used in departmental promotion and salary decisions.     

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.     

量化思维在绿色建筑设计教学中的应用研究

重形态分析、轻客观量化的传统设计教学模式与当今社会的绿色设计与可持续发展理念背道而驰。随着绿色建筑设计思想的普及,如何在设计教学中强化量化思维,完善教学模式,是每一个教学工作者的义务和责任。通过反思与总结传统设计教学中的弊端,结合绿色建筑的核心设计原则,尝试性的探索了引导学生在设计过程中产生并形成量化思维的方法与规律。     

Further Evidence on the Value of Lectures in Elementary Economics

Buckles and McMahon have designed an experiment which can be used in all types of colleges to provide evidence on the best methods of teaching elementary economics. They have tested the hypothesis that class lectures which do no more than recapitulate assigned readings fail to help students learn elementary microeconomic theory. Grade point average and performance on the TUCE pretest were found to be important variables, but attendance at lectures was not. The authors discuss the implications of their findings and suggest further research efforts.     

The Educational Choice Anomaly for Principles Students: Using Ordinary Supply and Demand Rather than Indifference Curves

The surprise value of many economic observations makes the economics discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of dropouts can often result in a lower level of educational quality purchased. This result is easy to show with indifference curves, but many instructors of introductory courses do not introduce this analytical technique. As a consequence, a result that many students find quite interesting is seldom presented. The authors show that it is easy to clarify the educational choice anomaly with ordinary supply and demand curves. Moreover, the exercise of doing so provides students with a greater understanding of benefit/cost analysis as well as consumer and producer surplus.     

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.     

Foreign GTAs Can Be Effective Teachers of Economics

The authors tested whether student performance in the principles of economics course is affected by the use of graphs as part of a lecture. They conducted two experiments at the University of South Carolina, one in spring 1995 and another in spring 1997. Students were randomly assigned to either a nographs lecture or a lecture with graphs. The main hypothesis was that students in the lectures with graphs would show higher gain scores than those in the nograph lectures (both lectures were videotaped). The authors found that students in the lecture with graphs in 1995 had significantly lower gain scores than those in the no-graphs lecture. For 1997, they found no significant differences in student performance between the two groups.     

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).     

Using Electronic Response Systems in Economics Classes

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 experiences in using this technology-enhanced teaching pedagogy and provide another example of an active and collaborative learning tool that instructors can use to move beyond “chalk and talk.” Preliminary survey results from students participating in this pilot project are also reported.     

Father Knows Best: Using Adam Smith to Teach Transactions Costs

Adam Smith's moral philosophy can be used to introduce economics students to the important idea of transactions costs. The author provides a brief background in this article to Smith's moral philosophy and connects it to the costs of transacting in a way that fits easily into the standard principles of microeconomics classroom. By doing so, instructors can also demonstrate to students that there are connections between ethical behavior and market outcomes.     

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.     

Using Empirical Point Elasticities to Teach Tax Incidence

Using point elasticities rather than using either arc elasticities or slopes of demand and supply curves provides the best method for teaching students about the economic impacts of excise taxes. Not only does a point-elasticity approach simplify theoretical analysis of tax impacts, but it also allows instructors to take advantage of publicly available empirical estimates of demand and supply elasticities to show students how theoretical results can be applied to real-world tax policy issues. To illustrate these advantages, the authors use several available estimates of point elasticities of demand and supply of raw sugar to calculate the economic impacts of a recently proposed penny-per-pound tax on raw cane sugar grown in the Florida Everglades.     

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.     

Clickenomics: Using a Classroom Response System to Increase Student Engagement in a Large-Enrollment Principles of Economics Course

One of the most important challenges facing college instructors of economics is helping students engage. Engagement is particularly important in a large-enrollment Principles of Economics course, where it can help students achieve a long-lived understanding of how economists use basic economic ideas to look at the world. The author reports how instructors can use Classroom Response Systems (clickers) to promote engagement in the Principles course. He draws heavily on his own experience in teaching a one semester Principles course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but also reports on how others have used clickers to promote engagement. He concludes with evidence that students find clickers very beneficial and with an assessment of the costs and benefits of adopting a clicker system.     

Coexistence of long-term and short-term contracts

We study the length of agreements in a market in which infinitely-lived firms contract with agents that live for two periods. Firms differ in the expected values of their projects, as do workers in their abilities to manage projects. Worker effort is not contractible and worker ability is revealed during the relationship. The market dictates the trade-off between sorting and incentives. Short- and long-term contracts often coexist: The best firms always use short-term contracts to hire high-ability senior workers, firms with less profitable projects use short-term contracts to save on the cost of hiring junior workers, whereas intermediate firms use long-term agreements to provide better incentives to their workers. We relate our results to the optimal assignment literature that follows Becker (1973).     

Professional Developments and Opportunities

Surveys in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 investigated teaching and assessment methods in different undergraduate courses. In this article, the authors offer basic results from the 2010 survey. “Chalk and talk” remains the dominant teaching style, but there were drops in mean (although not median) values for those pedagogies and some growth in the use of other methods, including class discussion and computer-generated displays. More instructors provided students with problem sets and class notes, and computer lab assignments were increasingly common in econometrics and statistics courses. Experiments are occasionally used in introductory courses but almost never used in other courses. Calculus is not viewed as important by a majority of instructors in any courses but is considered more important in intermediate theory and statistics and econometrics courses.     

以“学生为中心”的英美文学教学改革

英美文学课不仅是学好语言的最佳手段,更是素质教育和人文精神培养的有效途径。鉴于目前普通高等教育英美文学教学的现状和中国全面推行素质教育的急迫形势,英美文学课程必须大胆改革,构建新型教学模式,激活文学课的原动力。重点探讨更适合学生综合素质开发的“以学生为中心”的英美文学教学模式,为英美文学课教学改革提供新思路、新途径。     

高校多媒体教学勿“喧宾夺主”

在高等院校，多媒体技术的教学应用日益广泛和深入。然而，存在着忽视“辅助”的宗旨、忽视课堂教学的灵活性和学生学习的自主性、盲目“拿来”、使用“过度”、照本宣科、排挤其他传统媒体、忽视板书等问题。为此，文章建议，要充分发挥多媒体教学的优势，应在更新教育观念、，鼓励教师研制开发多媒体教学课件、加强教师培训、和建立科学的多媒体教学监控与评价机制等四个方面做好工作。     

How is development economics taught in developing countries?

A survey of instructors and data collected from course syllabi and examinations are used to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and master's levels in developing countries, compared to undergraduate classes in the United States. Topic coverage, teaching approach, and means of assessment all differ from that in leading U.S. economics departments. Development economics is taught largely as a theoretical subject coupled with case studies in developing countries, with few courses emphasizing use of data or empirical methods. Limited financial resources, the educational level of students, and low involvement of instructors in research are considered as explanations for the way the subject is taught in developing countries. The authors conclude with suggestions for improving teaching of development economics.