Learning by Doing Models to Teach Undergraduate Economics

INTRODUCTION There has been a multitude of new thinking and research about various innovative teaching methods that can be used for economics courses both for undergraduates and for graduate MBA courses (see Becker and Watts (2005) and Becker, Watts and Becker (2006)). The traditional chalk and talk methods as a pedagogical tool in all subjects have become less and less popular as students become more and more demanding about teaching methods that are more in tune with the 21st century technological revolution. With a traditional "chalk and talk" pedagogical style, students tend to be less interested in the happenings of the classroom and more likely to let their minds wander. With the advent of smartphones and the use of laptops in the classrooms, students have every opportunity to tune out their professor and hop onto the internet where they can easily peruse the happenings of the day, catch up with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social media or could just carry on a text message conversation with their friends, some of whom might be sitting in the same classroom. In addition to this being problems for all courses, economics courses have the rather unsavory reputation of being dry, boring, impossible to understand, too math and graph oriented, too abstract with little real life applications etc. The last comment is especially galling as the principle ideas of economics have everything to do with business, and it is really not too difficult to come up with hundreds of examples of applications of each economic concept. If you open the pages of any Business news website or periodical you will find a lot of events happening right then that demonstrate some application of an economic concept. To counter this reputation it is important for economics instructors to make the subject appealing to students. While it is true that economics is a complex subject and teaching it to students, especially undergraduates, can be especially challenging, instructors have to teach students the subject in such a manner that they find interesting, relevant and able to be applied to real life situations. In this paper we suggest an alternate teaching tool to "chalk and talk"--learning by doing. This can be especially relevant where economics is taught in the business program and is an integral part of the business administration degree. The student is asked to be the owner of a hypothetical firm, and as the course progresses, the students have to analyze the effects of economic data and changing economic variables on the bottom line of their business. In this paper I describe the use of this teaching tool in a Principles of Microeconomics course and an International Economics course, and I use examples from the course material to illustrate the student learning goals. This project based learning method has been used twice (including the current semester) in an International Economics course, but in this paper I also provide a brief guide to using the method in a Principles of Microeconomics course. I also provide a brief survey about student perceptions about the pedagogical method being used here, and provide examples of similar techniques that can be used in other economics courses as well as economics courses that are taught in a non business school setting. TEACHING ECONOMICS IN BUSINESS SCHOOLS Economics as a course in Business Schools typically offers the exact same curriculum as in a Liberal Arts setting. The textbooks and all the support materials and test banks are essentially the same. However, students taking Economics courses as a Business Administration Major Core requirement or an Economics (or Business Economics) major within the Business School are exposed to a variety of other business disciplines like Management, Marketing, Finance, Accounting and Business Law. The pedagogy for all these different types of courses are naturally different but a closer look at some of the common teaching tools that are applied in these courses would indicate that they all use some kind of practical application that the students have to do themselves--get their hands dirty doing it, if you will. …