Teaching and Learning
Teaching and learning has many dimensions, including establishing specific learning goals and expectations for students, designing courses, syllabi, and programs, engaging in research on teaching, keeping up-to-date on relevant knowledge, and reflecting on teaching in order to improve student learning.
In Economics, this scholarship is reflected in the department's student learning goals, its curriculum, course syllabi, and faculty and departmental activities related to teaching.
Our faculty employ a variety of teaching strategies. Our students respond well to our courses. Our department has an average teaching evaluation score of 4.25 out of 5, where 4 is “very good” and 5 is “excellent”. Some of our teaching strategies are listed below.
In the classroom:
• Faculty use experiments and classroom games to involve students
in learning-by-doing.
• Faculty apply economic thinking to students’ lives
so that they can see that economics is not just about money and
firms but about decision-making under constraints.
• Faculty introduce real world examples using news articles
and current policy and craft real world problems that have both
intuitive and technical answers.
• Faculty have students work out problems in small groups
in class to break up lecture and reinforce material.
• Faculty have students create presentations on economic journal
articles.
• Guest speakers spark interest in particular topics.
• Faculty create clear lectures. Some faculty write all important
information on the board, and create tests that focus on material
presented in class so that students recognize the value of attending
class.
• Faculty provide handouts when students will find them helpful.
• Some faculty use the Socratic method, attempting to elicit
the “correct” answer from students based on a repetitive
question-answer dialogue. The professor tries to get the student
to understand the various relationships that are involved in understanding
an issue, teasing out assumptions, and relating one theoretical
position to another.
• Faculty integrate their research into classroom lecture
material.
• Some faculty require students to write essays that reflect
on lecture or retell economic principles through examples taken
from everyday life.
• Some faculty use non-traditional methods to test their students.
-One method employed is to test almost daily with quizzes, to create
incentives to keep up with the class material on a regular basis,
not just right before major exams.
• Faculty try to use humor as often as possible to make the
course fun and interesting.
Outside the classroom:
• Faculty use interactive and computer-based learning.
- Some faculty use Aplia for homework assignments. Faculty can assign
timely news articles and create assignments that are due throughout
the week, to ensure that students “think economics”
every day. Computer based interactive learning makes it feasible
to evaluate students frequently, even in our largest classes.
- We correspond with students by e-mail on a daily basis.
- Faculty have developed course web pages to distribute course material.
- Faculty use WebCT to interact with students over the Internet.
• To accommodate students, faculty typically have an open-door
policy for office visits. Faculty go out of their way to make themselves
available to help students understand course material.
• Faculty try to get to know students on an individual basis,
by meeting with them one on one.
Distance and Distributed Education:
We have begun offering our introductory courses on-line. On-line
courses offer us a very effective way of reaching students who are
unable to come to campus. Through the use of smart classrooms, lectures
are videotaped and broadcast on the Web, to be viewed at the students’
convenience. Students who watch the lectures in real-time can phone
in questions that the professor can address immediately. Students
can submit assignments on-line, and get feedback easily. Our introductory
courses are particularly well suited to distance learning, because
of the large numbers of students who wish to take these classes,
and because they are typically taught in a lecture format.
Evaluation of these courses using traditional methods is challenging,
because students rarely complete course evaluations. We plan to
begin online evaluation of these courses in Fall 2004. Student performance
in courses taught in the traditional format and the Web format by
the same instructor has been very similar.
