According to a Pew study, 70% of students play video games and nearly one in three admits to playing them in class without the instructor’s knowledge. Many popular computer games like Civilization and SimCity include challenges that are economic in nature. But the “serious-game” movement aims to deliver educational content in a game that harnesses students’ natural competitiveness while keeping their interest.

Now a video game has been developed to fill a three-credit requirement in economics. The entire course is a video game that students play online. The game was created by over 30 faculty and staff from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Department of Economics and the Division of Continual Learning. Called simply ECON201, the game is offered as an alternative to a traditional one-term course in microeconomic principles, which is also offered at UNCG. To play the game and get course credit, students must register. In-state students pay $280 for the course; out-of-state visiting students pay $480 (though transferring that credit to one’s own institution may not be seamless).

Let me make clear that I have not paid the $480 to register and thus have not played the game. Even if I had played it, I might be able to say something about the economics but not how the game compares to the level of play students have grown accustomed to. My descriptions and comments are based on information available online about ECON201 at http://econ201.uncg.edu/dcl/econ201/ (the site offers an opportunity to request more information via email, which I did, but I’ve received nothing yet). The game was tested in the spring of 2006 and has been offered since then. I have no idea how the course has worked out so far except that it is being offered again this fall.

Still, I think video games could represent a significant development in economic education. Could a well-thought-out and engaging video game teach economics more efficiently than more traditional teaching methods? Professor Jeff Sarbaum, a UNCG economist who provided content, plans to compare the value added from the game with that from the traditional course. I will report on any findings in the future. In the meantime, here’s some background and a few comments on this game.

An alien craft has crash-landed on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The head of the aliens was killed in the crash, so the student, who is next in the chain-of-command in this role-playing game, must take over. Thus the student assumes the role of an alien from Sarbonia, a distant world that knows no scarcity. The student, as commander, must now learn how to cope with scarcity to help crew members survive and perhaps return to their world.

In one of the scenarios early in the game, the aliens must decide how to allocate their people in order to gather food and water for survival. In another scenario, the aliens come across a second group of aliens that survived the crash, and learn how to trade. The promotional material claims the course covers all the micro principles topics and is also interdisciplinary. For example, students must make ethical decisions as they play the game. In one scenario a disease breaks out and they must decide who is to be saved. They are also introduced to historical examples of how Earth faced similar problems in the past.

The game has eight levels to be covered in an eight-week term. Each focuses on a fundamental economic concept. To gauge how well students are doing, they take multiple-choice tests as they move through the different levels of the game. If the score is “passing,” the student can move to the next level or play more to improve the score at the current level. Each level has an end-date that locks in the score. Questions are randomized, reducing the chances that the student can simply memorize answers.

That’s the setup. So the Sarbonians (named after Professor Sarbaum) come from an alien world that knows no scarcity. How can that be? Since there is a chain-of-command on the ship, there must be a scarcity of power. They obviously don’t live forever since some were killed in the crash, so time itself must be scarce. If there were a world that knows no scarcity, I would be interested in learning how and why. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to begin with such a hypothetical as a point of departure.

The beauty of a market economy is that nobody really needs to know anything about supply or demand curves in order for a market to work fairly well. Likewise, we don’t really need to know anything about gravity to observe Newton’s principles in action. The world-without-scarcity setup seems like a lot of extra work to teach students many things that already come naturally. I would prefer a game that begins with the natural economist in all of us rather than teaching economics as a foreign language that first must be mastered to be useful.

In September, the journal Nature reported that dozens of papers containing apparently plagiarized research were taken down from a popular physics Web site housed at Cornell University. Sixty-seven papers by 15 physicists from four Turkish universities were removed after closer scrutiny revealed the problem. The name of one graduate student was on 40 of the 67 problematic papers. Suspicions were raised when, during the oral defense of his dissertation, he failed to grasp even some basic concepts of physics.

This underscores the value of an oral defense, and it reminds me of an experience I had with a student years ago in an undergraduate class. I assigned a term paper, and the class was small enough that I had students summarize their research in class. I encouraged the rest of the class to ask questions, and I would later chime in with my own. The student in this one case had an interesting topic, but he seemed annoyed with questions—as if to say the answers were obvious. But they weren’t, and his vague responses didn’t help.

His paper, as later submitted, made a lot more sense and was well written. Because I thought his topic was interesting but was troubled with his class presentation, I decided to pursue his research a bit more. At the college library, I identified what seemed like an especially relevant book on the topic. I found it had been marked with brackets as if to guide a typist, with some words penciled in to string it all together. These markings and edits corresponded exactly to his submitted paper. Not only had he plagiarized nearly all of his paper from this single source, he failed to erase the evidence. Were it not for his prickly and vague responses to questions during his class presentation, I doubt I would have uncovered the fraud.

Because plagiarism is even easier in this cut-and-paste Internet age, perhaps we should lean more towards requiring research summaries in class. Most students don’t like getting up in front of class, but the experience is valuable for them, and it may offer the instructor an additional check on the provenance of their work. No question, the class would have to be small enough to accommodate the time required (for example, 10-minute presentations by 20 students would fill four 50-minute classes). Because some students may be more inclined to skip classes turned over entirely to such presentations, we could spread them out more so they claim only half a class period.

The share of students taking an economics course in high school increased from 49% in 1982 to 66% in 2005. Another 22% in 2005 took courses that included economics, such as business, personal finance, or some combination course. Only 12% took no courses with an economics component.

For more than three decades the National Assessment of Educational Progress has tested elementary and secondary students in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and other subjects to develop objective information about performance at the national, state, and local level. For the first time, a test in economics was administered to twelfth graders in 2006. The results were just reported. Achievement levels are based on what a panel of economists and educators decided students should know and be able to do. Based on a nationally representative sample of 11,500 twelfth graders from 590 public and nonpublic high schools, 21% scored below what was considered to be a “basic” level, 37% were at a “basic” level, 39% were “proficient,” and 3% were “advanced.”

The share of males and females scoring below the basic level was about the same at 21%, but 34% of males scored at the basic level versus 41% of females; 41% of males scored at the proficient level, versus 36% of females; and 4% of males scored at the advanced level, versus 2% of females.

Among students who had at least one parent who was a college graduate, 13% scored below the basic level, 33% were at the basic level, 49% were proficient, and 5% were advanced. Among students with neither parent graduating from high school, 42% scored below basic, 40% were basic, 16% were proficient, and less than 1% were advanced. Thus, among those with at least one college graduate parent, 54% were proficient or advanced—more than triple the 17% among students without a high school graduate parent.

In other demographic breakouts, 13% of whites, 43% of blacks, and 36% of Hispanics scored below the basic level (here, white and black groupings exclude those of Hispanic origin). Thirty-six percent of whites, 41% of blacks, and 43% of Hispanics were at the basic level; 47% of whites, 15% of blacks, and 20% of Hispanics were proficient; and 4% of whites and less than 1% of blacks and Hispanics were advanced. For the complete report, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2006/2007475.pdf.

John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year at 97, once wrote that “Of all the classes, the wealthy are the most noticed and the least studied.” Robert Frank, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal aims to remedy this by delving into rich living in Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (Crown, 2007). Like any group, the rich has its share of great people, lucky people, insecure people, and jerks. Most seem like the rest of us, but with more money. The book is probably not that appropriate for the classroom. Understandably, it’s more descriptive than theoretical, and it’s all over the place in terms of coverage. Still, it contains some interesting stuff. Here’s some of that:

$ Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen owns yachts measuring 198 feet, 300 feet, and 400 plus feet, the latter costing $250 million. Yacht owners can expect to pay 10% to 15% of the purchase price each year to operate and maintain the craft. In the next year or two, the world will see the first yachts that stretch past 500 feet—one is being built for the ruler of Dubai and another for a Russian tycoon.

$ The United States, for the first time in history, now has more millionaire households—about 10 million—than does all of Europe. India, with nearly four times the U.S. population, has less than 1% of America’s millionaires—about 90,000—the same number as North Carolina.

$ Classic luxury car brands such as BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar are now less in favor among the rich. One up-and-comer is the downscale Bentley Continental, starting at about $180,000.

$ The most prestigious watch among the rich is the Swiss-made Franck Muller. One Franck Muller model, the Aeternitas, tells the day, date, month, and moon phase for the next 1,000 years. It sells for $736,000, which would buy four Bentley Continentals.

$ The rich are bypassing traditional charities to fund projects directly such as wells and health clinics in Africa. Traditional charities don’t like the trend.

$ Five times as many homes larger than 5,000 square feet were built in 2005 than in 1995.

$ In a 2005 study, fewer than half of the wealthy surveyed agreed that “wealth has made me happier.” Ten percent of the men and 16 percent of women felt that wealth created more problems than it solved.

THE GRAPEVINE

The Spring 2007 issue of The Teaching Economist looked at whether and how instructors discourage students from arriving late to class. This prompted Lee Spector of Ball State University to send a link to a study in which he and his colleague James McClure looked at student behaviors considered rude or disruptive, including tardiness. They wanted to find out whether “certain well-recognized and easily-observable” behaviors related to test performance in three entry-level economics courses. They sorted “classroom incivilities” into two categories: 1) behaviors disrespectful to the instructor because they suggest disinterest in the class, such as tardiness, sleeping in class, and reading outside material in class; and 2) behaviors disrespectful to classroom decorum but not necessarily to the instructor, such as eating, drinking, and wearing hats in class. Graduate students sat in the back and checked off these behaviors in each class (students were not told about this). The resulting check marks were aggregated for each student into a disinterest index for the disrespectful-to-the-instructor behaviors and a boorishness index for the disrespectful-to-class-decorum behaviors. Attendance was required in these courses. After controlling for some other student characteristics, such as gender, major, and starting GPA, they found that their disinterest index was negatively and significantly related to exam scores: “the behaviors that strongly suggest disinterest in the professor’s lectures do seem to adversely affect student performance.” The boorishness index didn’t seem to matter. The authors speculate that in-class behaviors such as eating, drinking, and wearing hats, are not considered boorish by today’s students. See “Behavior and Performance in the Classroom,” Educational Research Quarterly, Vol. 27 no.1 (2004): 15-23 at http://web.bsu.edu/cob/econ/research/papers/mcclure2003erq.pdf. I’ll add that because attendance was required in these classes, this may have increased the disinterest index. If attendance wasn’t required, disinterested students more likely would have stayed away and not annoyed the instructor, at least not with their classroom behavior. You can lead a horse to water….

Also on the subject of student tardiness, Janet Novosad of Southern Illinois University writes that she found the following to be effective in getting students to class on time. On the first day of class, students are told there will be 5 to 10 pop quizzes during the term that will combine for 10% to 15% of the final grade. Each quiz will start exactly when the class is scheduled to begin. The instructor will ask five questions aloud, without repeating any. The quiz takes only about 5 minutes. Late students miss some or all of it. Obviously, there are no make-ups.

Oskar Harmon of the University of Connecticut and James Lambrinos of Union College wanted to learn whether proctoring exams in online courses affects student performance. They compared test results from two online principles of macroeconomics courses that were identical in every respect save one: The final exam was proctored in one class but not in the other. All other exams were not proctored. They estimated a model to predict exam scores based on several student characteristics, such as the student’s GPA. The authors reasoned that if cheating is more prevalent during unproctored exams, then the explanatory power of the model for those exams would be lower than for proctored exams. In other words, if cheating occurs during the unproctored exam, variables such as a student’s GPA would do a poorer job at predicting a student’s performance. In a sense, cheating introduces more noise. They found a significantly higher R-square statistic for the proctored exam, suggesting that cheating occurred when exams were not proctored. “Are Online Exams an Invitation to Cheat?” University of Connecticut Working Paper 2006-08 (Revised February 2007) can be found at http://www.econ.uconn.edu/working/2006-08r.pdf.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, majored in economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. In September, he wrote about how economics has influenced his thinking: “I’m convinced that the study of economics changes brains in a way I can identify after about five minutes of conversation. In particular, I think the study of economics makes you relatively immune to cognitive dissonance…. The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems. The joke about economists is that they are always using the phrase ‘On the other hand.’ Economists are trained to recognize all sides of an argument. That seems like an easy and obvious skill, but in my experience, the general population lacks that skill. Once people take a side, they interpret any argument on the other side as absurd. In other words, they are relatively susceptible to cognitive dissonance.” See his blog at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/on-the-other-ha.html.

Odds and Ends

Until recently, the Journal of Economic Education was available online for free. Though this provided a valuable public service, free online access likely cut into subscriptions. Circulation fell from a peak of 1,578 in 1995 to 990 in 2006, including only 133 individual subscriptions, which are $65 per year for print only and $68 for print plus online access (http://www.heldref.org/jecone.php). The editors continue to search for creative ways to make articles available without cannibalizing subscriptions.

In 2004, to stop grade inflation, Princeton adopted a common grading standard aimed at limiting the share of A’s to 35% of each undergraduate course. The policy seems to be working. The share of A’s declined from an average of 47% during 2001 to 2004 to 41% during 2004 to 2007. In the humanities, A grades fell from 56% to 46%. Social-science A’s dropped from 43% to 38%. Natural sciences, already the toughest graders, saw the smallest decrease, from 37% to 36%. Princeton officials note that the lower grades do not appear to have harmed undergraduate admissions to graduate study.

Speaking of grades, I figure I have given out over 30,000 exam grades. In those cases where I overlooked an answer or totaled the score incorrectly, students have never been shy about correcting any errors to improve their grades. I expect my mistakes are symmetrical—that is, I am just as likely to come up with a score that is too high as too low. But I don’t recall a student ever asking me about a score or grade they believed was too high. This introduces a small but upward bias to our grading.

The discussion of student presentations in class reminded me that even in grade school I had to present a ‘floor talk” each week for a few minutes on a topic of my choice. Each school day, students drawn from a row of desks would get up and give a little talk. One day when my turn came, I decided to tell some jokes. Students seemed surprised and pleased, and the class came alive as we all had a good laugh. The next day every student in the next row got up and told jokes. Once the laugh fest died down, the teacher gently noted that while telling jokes did indeed require talking, and thus would be a “floor talk,” she preferred that we offer information we could all learn from, so no more jokes. I still recall one I told, but I don’t remember any other “floor talk” I gave.

Although British writer P.G. Wodehouse (of Bertie Wooster fame) lived on Long Island from 1952 until his death in 1975, it was said that until the end he still reckoned dollar prices in pounds and shillings.

A generation ago, the easiest way to determine the historical setting of a movie was to look at transportation of the day. Finer dating now comes from the look of personal computers and the size of cell phones, which have gone from brick size to bite size.

Wikipedia’s “Economic Classroom Experiments” lists 20 experiments, tips on running these experiments, and links and related literature. Go to http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Economic_Classroom_Experiments.

Why are political scholars called political scientists, but economic scholars are mere economists? Probably because political scholars must not be confused with politicians. Besides, the term “economic scientists” might make us more of a soft target.

"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances." —Albert Schweitzer

“Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”—H.L. Mencken

“Money has a nasty habit of disappearing.”—Kevin Hassett

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments on a draft of this issue, I thank John Carey, Sarah Greber, Dennis Hanseman, Charles Martie, Stephen Miller, and Susan Smart.

If you have developed any attention-getting examples, ways to "sensationalize" economic ideas, useful resources on the Internet, or more generally, ways to teach just for the fun of it, please share these with colleagues in “The Grapevine” by sending them to:

William McEachern, Editor
The Teaching Economist
Department of Economics
University of Connecticut
341 Mansfield Road , Unit 1063
Storrs , CT 06269-1063

e-mail: william.mceachern@uconn.edu

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 Return to Contents of Issue 33, Fall 2007