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These
newsletters are aimed at making your teaching, particularly your teaching
of economic principles, more effective and more enjoyable.
William
A. McEachern, Editor
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William A. McEachern, Editor
Welcome
to The Teaching Economist, a semi-annual newsletter aimed at making
your teaching of economics more fun and more effective. Now
in its fifteenth year, The Teaching
Economist also provides a forum, called The
Grapevine, where contributors can share teaching ideas.
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Issue 34
Spring 2008
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Index of Issues
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Subscription Information
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If you have not yet asked to receive a hard copy of this semiannual newsletter, compliments of Thomson South-Western, or if you need to change your address, please write to:
Thomson South-Western
The Teaching Economist
Attn: John Carey
5191 Natorp Blvd.
Mason, OH 45040-7945
E-mail: J.Carey@thomson.com
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Contribute
Your Ideas for the Grapevine
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| If you
have developed any attention-getting examples, ways to 'sensationalize'
economic concepts, 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 A. McEachern, Editor
The Teaching Economist
Department of Economics
University of Connecticut
341 Mansfield Rd, Unit 1063
Storrs, CT 06269-1063
E-mail: william.mceachern@.uconn.edu
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About the Editor
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| William
A. McEachern is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Connecticut.
Since 1973 he has taught principles of economics and in 1980 developed
a series of annual workshops for teaching assistants. He has given
teaching workshops around the country and is the author of Economics:
A Contemporary Introduction, a best-selling principles of
economics textbook.
Professor McEachern earned an undergraduate degree
cum laude in the honors program from Holy Cross College and an
M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has authored
several books and monographs in public finance, public policy,
and industrial organization. His research has appeared in edited
volumes as well as journals such as Economic Inquiry, National
Tax Journal, Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Industrial
Economics, Kyklos, Quarterly Review of Economics and Business,
Challenge, and Public Choice.
Professor McEachern has been quoted in publications
such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,
The Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today. He
has received the University of Connecticut's Faculty Award for
Distinguished Public Service. He has also received
the University of Connecticut's Faculty Award for Excellence in
Teaching.
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About the Publisher
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South-Western
is a division of Cengage Learning. Founded in 1903, South-Western
is the premier publisher for business education. Please share your
questions or comments about our economics publishing program with
us. We are committed to serving your educational needs.
For helpful comments on a draft of this issue, I thank Sarah Greber, Dennis Heffley, Charles Martie, Stephen Miller, and Dave Shaut.
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Table of Contents
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Teaching, Thinking, and Learning
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| The Cognitive Science Society holds its 30th anniversary conference this July. The group’s objective has been no less than developing a “unified theory of cognition.” At the first conference, Herbert Simon, fresh off his Nobel Prize in economics, sounded this keynote: “Cognitive science is, of course, not really a new discipline, but a recognition of a fundamental set of common concerns shared by the disciplines of psychology, computer science, linguistics, economics, epistemology, and the social sciences generally. All of these disciplines are concerned with information processing systems, and all of them are concerned with systems that are adaptive…”(Simon, p. 33). Though cognitive science remains a work in progress, with most areas far from settled, decades of experiments have yielded enough fruit to warrant review in this issue of The Teaching Economist. [More]
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Conventional wisdom has long held that students can learn how to solve computational problems by following the template of worked-out problems. Some textbooks even include worked-out problems in the body of the text. But a special issue of Learning and Instruction (Vol. 16, April 2006) has published several studies that cast doubt on the effectiveness of worked-out problems, at least as a general approach. In that issue, Roxana Moreno of the University of New Mexico offers commentary on these findings. Here are some possible reasons why students have difficulty applying solutions from worked-out examples to new problems. Students often suffer from what’s been called an ‘‘illusion of understanding.’’ They think they know more than they do. Also, some students apparently can’t identify key information in the examples and instead focus on irrelevant features. Moreno’s commentary, “When Worked Examples Don’t Work: Is Cognitive Load Theory at an Impasse?” can be found at http://www.iapsych.com/articles/moreno2006.pdf.
[More]
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Odds and Ends
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“The hordes of English majors who fill our classes might think twice if they knew that economics and mathematics -- with their emphasis on problem-solving -- are the best preparation for a career in law. Flowery prose is seldom valued by an overburdened judiciary.” —Cameron Stracher, publisher of the New York Law School Law Review and co-director of the Program in Law & Journalism [More]
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Ideas for the Grapevine
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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: [More]
[Back to top]
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