From: Hal.Varian@umich.edu
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Declining Intro Enrolments
Date: 27 Dec 1992 20:51:19 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan
Distribution: world
Reply-To: Hal.Varian@umich.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: alfred.econ.lsa.umich.edu

In article <thompson.724945888@daphne.socsci.umn.edu>  
thompson@atlas.socsci.umn.edu (T. Scott Thompson) writes:

> I would be very interested in seeing articles on the net about
> innovative teaching methodology in economics courses.  Most new
> Ph.D.'s in economics have virtually no training in how to teach,
> having been left to their own devices in graduate school.  (I am
> speaking about U.S. training.  Perhaps things are better elsewhere.)

Good idea. I don't know how innovative it is, but here's what I do here at  
Michigan in my intermediate micro course.

Background: About 225 students per semester sign up for the course, and there  
is about a 10% attrition rate.  We use my textbook, Intermediate Microeconomics  
(W. W. Norton), and cover about 1 chapter/module per lecture.  There are 4  
quizzes, 2 midterms, and one final.  I give 2 1-hour lectures per week for all  
200 students, and each of the other professors involved with the course runs 2  
1-hour sections per week with about 30 students in each section.

Philosophy: Richard Hamming, a noted electrical engineer and author of several  
textbooks, once gave me some great advice about textbook writing. He said "Get  
together the problem sets and exams that you want the students to be able to  
solve after they've completed your course, and then write the textbook that  
will enable them to solve them."

That's pretty much the plan I have followed in writing my textbooks.  One of  
the important things that distinguishes economics from other social sciences is  
that you can use it to solve problems.  This is a skill that becomes second  
nature to someone majoring in engineering or science, but needs to be nurtured  
in students majoring in humanities or (other) social sciences.  Intermediate  
micro is a good place to help students learn this skill.

Details: The lectures cover the basic material, and some current events from  
the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Economist.  The sections are  
devoted to solving problems from the workbook.  We have *tons* of problems.  I  
encourage the students to work together on problems from the workbook as  
homework.  The quizzes are direct translations of workbook problems; the exams  
contain some of the homework problems plus new problems.

We have some nice software (Norton Testmaker) that will generate variations on  
problems given a template.  We use this for supply-demand, monopoly problems,  
tax problems, etc ---basically all the standard problems that I want the  
students to be able to solve after they complete the course.  The workbooks are  
"fill-in-the-blank", the quizzes are multiple choice.

The students think the course is a lot of work, but they also think that they  
have learned a lot.  The students go on to take other undergraduate courses in  
economics with a very solid base in intermediate micro.  The teachers who get  
them after this course are very happy with the students' preparation.

We also run a double oral auction somewhere during the semester to show the  
students that economics actually works.  I would like to get more experiments  
like this into the course, but the problem is in finding the time.
--
Hal.Varian@umich.edu    Hal Varian
voice: 313-764-2364     Dept of Economics
fax:   313-764-2364     Univ of Michigan
                        Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Newsgroups: sci.econ