‘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.     

The Overconfident Principles of Economics Student: An Examination of a Metacognitive Skill

Students in a large principles of macroeconomics class were asked to predict their performance on a regularly scheduled midterm examination. The author collected and analyzed data to examine the effect of various demographic characteristics, academic endowments, course preparation, and course performance variables on the accuracy of pretest expectations. A two-equation recursive model was estimated by the author to determine which factors influenced the accuracy of student expectations (predictive calibration). The results indicated that a pervasive degree of overconfidence existed within the sample. Although age and overall academic performance were found to temper overconfidence, students with credit in a previous economics course had a greater probability of reporting overconfident expectations. Overconfidence was found to be associated with lower degrees of predictive calibration. Misjudgments concerning the scope of the midterm were found to lower predictive calibration scores, ceteris paribus. These and other results indicate that unmet student performance expectations may be a root cause for the routinely observed student dissatisfaction within the traditional principles course.     

An Economic Model of Faculty Grading Practices

The statistical evidence examined by the author indicates that faculty members with relatively few students tend to assign higher grades than would be expected otherwise. In evaluating student achievement and faculty performance, therefore, one must not only be aware of this association, but also be able to assess its significance.     

Accountability,incentives and behavior: the impact of high-stakes testing in the Chicago Public Schools

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades 3 to 8 each year and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of such policies. This study examines the impact of an accountability policy implemented in the Chicago Public Schools in 1996–1997. Using a panel of student-level, administrative data, I find that math and reading achievement increased sharply following the introduction of the accountability policy, in comparison to both prior achievement trends in the district and to changes experienced by other large, urban districts in the mid-west. However, for younger students, the policy did not increase performance on a state-administered, low-stakes exam. An item-level analysis suggests that the observed achievement gains were driven by increases in test-specific skills and student effort. I also find that teachers responded strategically to the incentives along a variety of dimensions—by increasing special education placements, preemptively retaining students and substituting away from low-stakes subjects like science and social studies.     

Encouraging Tutorial Attendance at University Did Not Improve Performance

When tertiary education is subsidised the cost of poor student performance in university subjects falls not only on the individual student but also on society in general. Society therefore has an interest in promoting student performance. There is evidence in the literature that absenteeism from university classes is widespread and that absenteeism adversely affects student performance. In this paper I describe an incentive scheme that increased attendance of business and economics students in an introductory statistics subject at a typical Australian university. Like other authors I find a strong positive association between attendance and academic performance, both in the presence and absence of the scheme. However, there is no evidence that the incentive scheme caused student performance to improve. Although students attended more classes they did not perform better than students in the previous year's class who had the same observable characteristics and attendance levels but who were not exposed to the scheme.     

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.     

Absenteeism and Undergraduate Exam Performance

The author investigates the relationship between students' absenteeism during a principles of microeconomics course and their subsequent performance on exams. Records were maintained regarding the specific class periods that each student missed during the semester. Records were also kept of the class meeting when the material corresponding to each multiple-choice test question was covered. A qualitative choice model reveals that students who missed class on a given date were significantly more likely to respond incorrectly to questions relating to material covered that day than students who were present.     

The impact of charter school attendance on student performance

We employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in Texas to study the impact of charter school attendance. We control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts. We find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school, but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years. Failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement. Students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years, and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period. Furthermore, students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance.     

信息需求与IT投资的商业价值：组织资本视角的审视

我国企业对信息技术（简称IT）的投资巨大，已成为世界各大IT厂商的主要市场之一，但国内学术界和企业对IT投资对企业绩效的作用机理研究甚少。本文认为，IT投资是为了满足企业的信息需求，而企业的信息需求充分体现在组织资本的信息本质中，因此，IT投资的商业价值在于它促进了组织资本的形成和积累，并通过组织资本对组织的价值创造和价值增长产生有力的促进作用。本文力图帮助企业理解IT投资对企业绩效的作用机理，从而能够采取合理的IT投资策略以最大化IT投资的商业价值。     

Communications

The University of California, Berkeley sends more undergraduate students to economics PhD programs than any other public university. While this fact is surely a function of its size, there may be lessons from the Berkeley experience that others could adopt. To investigate why Berkeley generates so many economics PhD students, the author convened and interviewed two groups: economics student services staff and a self-selected focus group of twelve economics undergraduates who plan to apply to PhD programs. Four factors came up repeatedly in these conversations: math preparation, advanced track for theory courses, research opportunities, and availability of information. A fifth factor was implicit in the conversations: peer effects.     

The effect of information technology on IT-facilitated coordination,IT-facilitated autonomy,and decision-makings at the individual level

The effect of information technology (IT) has been a central concern to economics of IT ever since it has been viewed as an important resource to improve firm productivity. Although significant research progress has been made on the impacts of IT use at the individual level, the mechanism of how IT use increases individual performance at work has not been fully explored. In an attempt to examine the IT effects on performance, we focus on individual work productivity gained from IT use. Following the discussion of previous works, we develop a research model, describing that the ubiquitous IT transforms the way individual employers’ work in organizations, and facilitates working processes and practices that may affect the decision-making of individual performance.

As a result of testing the research model, we found not only that IT use does have a direct effect on the quality of decision-making in organizations, but that this effect is partially mediated by the extent of IT-facilitated autonomy and of IT-facilitated coordination. These findings suggest that the effects of IT use on decision-makings in an organization may be attributed, in part, to its beneficial use in coordination and tendency to foster more discretion.     

Families,schools and primary-school learning: evidence for Argentina and Colombia in an international perspective

This article presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly to some institutional school features and hardly to schools’ resource endowments. In an international perspective, family-background effects are relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas. A specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant between-gender performance differences. Nonnative students and students not speaking Spanish at home perform particularly weak in both countries. In Argentina, students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability-based class formation.     

The price stability under inflation targeting regime: An analysis with a new intermediate approach

This paper analyzes the relevance of the inflation targeting (IT) policy in achieving its primary goal of medium-term price stability. Contrary to previous studies, we propose, in this work, a new approach; an intermediate approach that consists in conducting a time-series analysis (employed in the literature under unilateral cases-absolute approach) with a comparison of inflation performance of IT countries and those of non-IT countries (comparison made in literature under the relative approach). Empirically, we employ a frequency analysis based on evolutionary spectral theory of Priestley (1965–1996) in order to distinguish between different inflation horizons; short-run and the medium-run inflation rates. To check the stability of spectral density functions for inflation series for each country under studied frequencies, we apply a Bai and Perron (2003a,b) test. Our results show that after IT framework implementation, there is no break point in inflation series in short and medium terms. This result is not verified for non-IT countries. Therefore, IT is more relevant in achieving price stability and consequently more effective on inflation expectation anchoring than other monetary policies.     

Programmed Learning-Policy Analysis: An Experiment in Teaching Principles of Economics

Darnton reports on an experiment using programmed instruction in macroeconomics. He also explains how assignments to write “position papers” on economic policies are used. An analysis of the experiment deals with the time devoted to the course by students and instructor, student understanding of economics and student attitude toward this approach. The TUCE was used as the testing instrument, and Darnton asserts that the experimental group did better than the control group on complex application questions. The experimental approach proved to be popular with the students, and the author claims that it provided for a more efficient use of faculty resources.     

Individual teacher incentives and student performance

This paper is the first to systematically document the relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement using the United States data. We combine data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey on schools, students, and their families with our own survey conducted in 2000 regarding the use of teacher incentives. This survey on teacher incentives has unique data on frequency and magnitude of merit raises and bonuses, teacher evaluation, and teacher termination. We find that test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance. Moreover, the estimated relationship between the presence of merit pay in teacher compensation and student test scores is strongest in schools that may have the least parental oversight. The association between teacher incentives and student performance could be due to better schools adopting teacher incentives or to teacher incentives eliciting more effort from teachers; it is impossible to rule out the former explanation with our cross sectional data.     

Selection on performance and tracking

Tracking is widely used in secondary schools around the world. Some countries put more emphasis on the use of performance to place students into tracks (e.g. the Netherlands), while in other countries parents have more influence on the track their child will go to (e.g. Germany). This article examines whether selection into tracks based on performance has an effect on the relation between tracking and student performance and educational opportunities. Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment for around 185 000 students in 31 countries, different estimation models are compared. The results indicate that a highly differentiated system is best for performance when schools always consider prior performance when deciding on student acceptance. In systems with a few tracks, there is no such impact. Equality of opportunity is best provided for in a system with many tracks when schools always consider prior performance.     

The Consequences of Using one Assessment System to Pursue two Objectives

Education officials often use one assessment system both to create measures of student achievement and to create performance metrics for educators. However, modern standardized testing systems are not designed to produce performance metrics for teachers or principals. They are designed to produce reliable measures of individual student achievement in a low-stakes testing environment. The design features that promote reliable measurement provide opportunities for teachers to profitably coach students on test-taking skills, and educators typically exploit these opportunities whenever modern assessments are used in high-stakes settings as vehicles for gathering information about their performance. Because these coaching responses often contaminate measures of both student achievement and educator performance, it is likely possible to acquire more accurate measures of both student achievement and education performance by developing separate assessment systems that are designed specifically for each measurement task.     

信息技术投入、技术创新动态能力与企业绩效关系研究

基于我国制造业上市公司2012-2017年数据,实证检验了信息技术投入、技术创新动态能力与企业绩效的关系。结果表明：信息技术投入与企业绩效呈显著U型关系,企业信息技术投入需要经历组织变革转型期,才会对企业绩效产生促进作用;信息技术投入与技术创新动态能力呈显著倒U型关系,信息技术投入能促进企业技术创新动态能力提升,但考虑到企业资源的有限性,信息技术投入与企业技术创新动态能力之间存在最佳平衡点;技术创新动态能力在信息技术投入与企业绩效之间起到显著非线性中介作用。     

大学生创业压力源、控制感与倦怠关系研究

本文对大学生的创业压力源、控制感和倦怠的构思结构及其三者之间的关系进行了探讨。首先对来自长三角地区、服务行业和IT行业的10名不同背景的初创企业的创业大学生进行了半结构化访谈,其次对访谈记录进行了内容分析,在文献研究和访谈研究的基础上设计了创业大学生初创企业压力源问卷,对获取的192份预测数据和229份正式测量数据进行了统计分析。研究结果表明：大学生创业压力源存在五因素结构模型,包括创业卷入、知识储备、竞争强度、资源需求和管理责任;这5个因素构成了创业大学生创业压力源的概念模型。创业压力源对倦怠各维度有显著性预测作用;控制感在创业压力源与倦怠关系中起到调节作用。同时,对大学生创业压力源与倦怠不同水平的感知差异在两种不同创业教育模式下也进行了比较。     

信息技术与国有商业银行产出率:一种实证分析

关于投资于信息技术是否会提高产出率的研究已有许多.这些研究大多集中产业层面和企业层面,而在企业层面的讨论更多是考察了制造业企业.本文则试图研究国有商业银行信息技术投资对产出率的作用.本文的结论是用于信息技术的投资并没有提高绩效而更多的是出于竞争目的的战略需要,分析的结果同时表明由于信息技术劳动有着巨大的投资回报,因此银行应该从重视信息技术资本投资转向重视信息技术劳动激励.