International Perspectives in Undergraduate Education

Recently an increasing number of high schools have begun offering economics courses. Suggestions for improving these courses have been the subject of frequent discussion within the profession, including articles by Stigler (1963), Maher (1969), and the National Task Force on Economic Education (1961). Unfortunately, it is not clear that these courses are actually improving the economic knowledge of students who take them. Poorly trained teachers, insufficient time spent on complex and confusing issues, and insufficient grounding in related subjects may result in little learning, or even worse, greater confusion among students who take high school economics courses than among similar students who do not. Earlier studies of this question have reported mixed findings. Clayton (1964) found significant association between students having taken high school economics and their performance in university courses. However, he failed to control for other differences among university students. Moyer and Paden (1968) controlled for aptitude, mathematics training, high school size, sex, academic year, and major. They found that students with high school courses know significantly more than other students at the beginning of their principles course, but that this difference is eliminated by the end of the course. Harbury and Szreter (1970), in a study of British students, controlled for various factors and found that high school economics made no difference either at the beginning or end of the university principles course. Finally, Saunders (1970) reported that students with high school economics courses knew significantly more at the end of the term even though they worked significantly fewer hours on the principles course, other things equal. This paper reports the results of a study of Canadian students at the University of Western Ontario during the fall of 1974. The main findings are that, adjusting for other factors, students who had taken previous economics courses did not begin their principles course with significantly more knowledge, nor did they learn significantly more during the semester. Furthermore, they received significantly lower grades than students who had never taken an economics course before.

PurposeTeaching complex economic theories can be made relevant through everyday life experiences and current economic, social, and environmental crises can be used as vehicles for student learning. The purpose of this paper is to help students understand that the economy should be seen as a social system that evolves over time driven by conflictive and contradictory forces and enable them to develop the critical thinking skills needed to make better choices for a more equitable and sustainable future.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the historical role played by neoliberalism on education in general and on the teaching of economics in particular. A historical/critical/action-learning approach discusses five pedagogical teaching methods that have been implemented in undergraduate economics courses and demonstrates how teaching social economics can be made possible by bringing the real world into the classroom and taking the classroom into the real world.FindingsThere is an urgent need to rethink the teaching of economics and the economics curriculum from one that stresses self-interest, profit maximization and cost minimization, to one that stresses cooperation, collaboration, fairness, and ethical values rather than economic value, as ways of satisfying society’s needs and addressing systemic issues of inequality, power and greed. Bringing teachers and students together in collaborative learning environments, thereby learning from the mistakes of the past and minimizing the impacts of the present so that future generations can also participate, is the much-needed change in how social economics can be taught post-financial crisis.Originality/valueThis paper is a response to the special issue on the theme teaching social economics during the global financial crisis. The authors have provided insights into their teaching pedgagogy in the context of this topic.

The choice of teaching methods and materials is affected by key school, departmental, and faculty characteristics. We investigate the effects of such characteristics and estimate how much changes in some school and departmental policies affect the probability that economics instructors will use particular teaching methods and materials in four different types of courses. As schools and departments change policies, often in response to changes in resource bases, they may not take into account how that affects faculty teaching and student time investments in coursework. That raises concerns about the relationship between these constraints, policies, and possible decreases in the quality of college graduates.

The authors show how the causes of and the gains from current account imbalances can be integrated into undergraduate economics courses using the same pedagogical tools that are used to explain comparative advantage and the gains from trade. A nonzero current account provides a mechanism for intertemporal trade, and a country has a comparative advantage in present (or future) goods if its autarky real interest rate is below (or above) the world real interest rate. The authors explain why the intertemporal approach to the current account reaches different conclusions from the traditional approach regarding welfare effects. Also, the authors integrate alternative approaches for explaining the underlying cause(s) of nonzero current account balances.

Despite the importance of entrepreneurship in market economies, it is seldom given extensive coverage in undergraduate economics courses. Authors documenting its limited treatment in textbooks call for more in-depth, microtheoretic analyses that go beyond definitions and descriptions. The present paper represents an initial attempt to fill this gap in our pedagogy by describing a simple model of the entrepreneur “plunge” decision that is appropriate for intermediate microeconomics (and related) courses. The model, an extension of Scitovsky’s classic theory of the owner-managed firm, provides a formal analysis of the choice between paid employment and entrepreneurship that is based on utility maximization and takes into account the pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits/costs of the two options. The intellectual origins and classroom presentation of the model are also discussed.

Distance learning universities use online asynchronous forums to engage students in course content and build student academic communities. This research uses a mixed-methods approach to provide new empirical and qualitative evidence on the impact of online forum participation on student retention and academic performance on an undergraduate Economics course at a distance learning university. Using inferential logit regression models, we find forum participation has a positive impact on the pass/distinction boundary but not on the pass/fail-resit boundary. Moreover, this study provides evidence of a significant positive effect of forum participation on retention. Encouraging students to post is important because there is a positive ‘forum effect’ regardless of whether the student initiates the post. We also find that the marginal benefit of forum posting is diminishing, implying that ‘nudging’ a student to post even a few times can have a positive impact on their retention, with the first post being most critical. Qualitative evidence from student interviewees suggests that the nature of the forum activities and time aspects are important factors influencing student motivation to participate. Based on these findings we create an ‘ideal recipe’ for forum activities that is most likely to elicit student participation and thus aid student retention.

How much time do academic economists allocate to teaching, research, and service, and how much time do their departments want them to allocate to these pursuits. As a result of the decline in economics majors in the early 1990s, was there a change in the reward system and time allocation of academic economists toward teaching. In this study, the authors combine 1995 and 2000 survey data collected by Becker and Watts (1996, 2001) to describe teaching methods in undergraduate economics courses at five Carnegie Foundation categories of colleges and universities in the United States. The focus here is on a previously unreported section of these surveys, in which respondents were asked to indicate the percentage of time they allocated to teaching, research, and service and to provide the weightings they felt their own departments assigned to these activities in making decisions about annual raises or promotion and tenure.

The authors of this article describe a unique approach to economics education in which contemplative deep listening practices were applied to Bruce Springsteen’s music in order to introduce basic economic concepts to incoming university students. The course Springsteen-omics: Economics through the Songs of Bruce Springsteen shifted the mechanisms by which college students interacted with introductory economic themes, providing them with a positive perception of economics and deepening the way they think about the economy. Using a qualitative analysis of responses to several learning reflection exercises, the authors also explore the impact of this pedagogy on student learning. Their findings indicate that students gained an appreciation for Springsteen’s music and deepened their ability to identify and describe the lyrical intent and economic themes in his songs.

Current academic interest in development economics, and the study of development economics as a separate subject, are relatively recent phenomena. For the student today it will be difficult to appreciate that as recently as thirty years ago a course in development economics was a rare feature of an undergraduate programme in economics, and that textbooks on economic development were few and far between. Today no self-respecting department of economics is without a course in economic development; there are scores of texts; hundreds of case studies; and thousands of articles on the subject. And, as in medicine, the perceived ills seem to multiply as the diagnosis deepens.

My assignment today is to discuss the uses and potential abuses of textbooks in the principles of economics course.' As I have dealt with my views on teaching macroeconomics and on the use and abuse of graphs in the principles course in a previous issue of this journal, I shall not discuss these matters in depth here. Before I present some of my opinions concerning this issue, I believe it is only proper for me to provide a little background. I have been teaching principles of economics at Stanford on and off for almost ten years. In the course at Stanford-as in the principles course at most other universities-the course instructor presents several lectures per week to throngs of undergraduates, mostly freshmen and sophomores, who also meet once a week with a graduate teaching assistant in small sections of twenty-five students. I am aware that there are other modes of teaching principles at other universities, perhaps the second most common being several meetings a week with a graduate teaching assistant and periodic professional lectures to the entire course enrollment. There is also substantial variance in the length and nature of time devoted to principles of economics at various universities. Perhaps most common is a two-quarter or a two-semester course, partly reflecting the traditional micro/ macro division, which is becoming decreasingly sensible in teaching principles (how anyone can be serious about teaching macro to students who have not had micro, and simultaneously avoid repeating much of what is taught in the micro half of the course, is becoming increasingly incomprehensible). In other universities, a one-quarter or one-semester introduction, designed both as a feed-in to intermediate micro or macro for majors and as a general service course for all students, is offered. Some universities even have the luxury of offering both options. Although information on textbook use and sales is notoriously unreliable, as near as anyone can tell far more than one million college students a year take the principles of economics course. Also, studies of retention levels indicate that, for whatever reason, our students are not retaining for even a year or two much of what we try to teach them.

As the Covid 19 Pandemic greatly impacted teaching and learning, academic institutions switched from in-person to online classes. This shift prompted an examination of students’ learning styles to accommodate their learning in virtual environment. The VARK (Visual-Aural-Read/Write-Kinesthetic) instrument was used to assess effectiveness of teaching and students’ learning in U.S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA) undergraduate engineering course. The VARK instrument was used to facilitate effective virtual classroom activities to engineering students during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper argues that students have different learning strengths and styles. Some students may learn best by watching and listening, others by thinking, and others by doing or by doing, touching, and feeling. Our results indicate that engineering students demonstrate a strong preference for at least two learning styles and the learning styles differ between male and female students. Females are not kinesthetic learners, but their preferable mode of learning is verbal or reading. Male students preferred aural style and African Americans kinesthetic learning style. This research was conducted to improve our teaching and provide students with safe learning environment during challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper finds that learning styles are important across all majors during virtual learning and teaching. The VARK instrument can be used to indicate cadets’ learning styles to facilitate effective learning and teaching in virtual environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

designed to improve the relevancy of the introductory economics course will hopefully heighten interest and improve results. In order to motivate students to deal effectively with abstract economic theory Leftwich and Sharp have experimented successfully with an issues- oriented principles course at Oklahoma State University.3 At Empire State College one commonly utilized approach is to apply the economic tools of analysis to an area in which the student has already developed a strong interest. This interest is usually derived from a combination of academic and professionally related sources. Basically, the course of study is tailored to the individual needs of the student, while the learning activities quite often incorporate some aspect of the student's job-related experience. The performance of students at the introductory level of study in economics at ESC has been consistently better for those students whose contracts include additional economics work which focuses on their individual fields of interest. Those students who are taking introductory economics as a one or two-semester isolated course are not performing as well as those who intend to apply the economic tools of analysis to their particular interests (of course neither group would be considered economics majors). The flexibility of ESC's approach allows the student to incorporate an applied follow-up course into one complete contract, or course of study. The student spends about the same amount of time on each portion of the contract. This usually consists of the equivalent of six to 12 semester hours. ESC students typically hold full-time jobs and tend to be older than the students at traditional colleges. The following are examples of contracts in which the student has taken introductory economics as part of a larger course of study: 1. A registered nurse majoring in health sciences applied basic economic principles to the economics of health care;

The state of undergraduate economics courses in Tamilnadu universities

The Economic Statistics Skills Assessment (ESSA)

This article uses survey data from different economic principles courses to examine two related questions. First, the impact of certain variables is analyzed, including both student-specific characteristics and those of the student's economic principles course, regarding the frequency of e-mail use. Second, the article considers whether students view e-mail as a substitute for or complement to other methods of contacting faculty. No matter the frequency of use, e-mail appears to be a viable substitute. Only infrequent users, however, appear to view e-mail as a complement to existing means of contact.