This study looks at the performance of students in an online and face-to-face section of economic principles with the same instructor. After controlling for the bias of students selecting the online section and observable characteristics, we did not find any statistical difference in the exam performance of students across delivery modes of the…

Using a combination of survey and student record data from a first year university economics principles class, we look at the characteristics of students who are attending face-to-face lectures, versus those students who choose to view these same lectures via online lecture recordings. The survey includes the Biggs (2001) Revised Study Process…

A major challenge that chemical engineering graduates face at the modern workplace is the management and operation of plants under conditions of uncertainty. Developments in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomics offer tools to address this challenge with rather well developed concepts, such as decision theory and financial risk…

The authors present suggestions by graduate students from a range of economics departments for improving the first-year core sequence in economics. The students identified a number of elements that should be added to the core: more training in building microeconomic models, a discussion of the methodological foundations of model-building, more…

The authors describe the theoretical preparation provided to students in advance of a limited-duration experiential learning experience in Washington DC in a Master's level course for students in Business or Public Administration. The students consider theoretical perspectives from economics, political science, and public administration with…

Economic educators often profess the goal of teaching our students to "think like economists." Since Siegfried and colleagues (1991) coined this phrase, its meaning has been interpreted as a focus on analytical concepts and methods of economics as opposed to the broader goal of preparing students for independent, critical thought in the…

No matter the college, a class in the principles of microeconomics is likely to cover the discipline's greatest hits. The author attends three economics courses at three colleges, and finds three very different approaches. In this article, the author discusses three colleges' different approaches that shape learning in Econ 101.

Research on the effects of grading on participation behavior is mixed. This study adds to the literature by analyzing the motivational effects of a policy that incorporates student self-assessment, flexible course weighting of the participation grade, and an expanded definition of participation. The results suggest that in some classes, more than…

The assessment of university students' economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students' economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings…

In this article, the authors illustrate how incentives can improve student performance in introductory economics courses. They implemented a policy experiment in a large introductory economics class in which they reminded students who scored below an announced cutoff score on the midterm exam about the risk of failing the course. The authors…

In this paper we explore and discuss an important research question in higher education--is there a trade-off relationship between in-class and out-of-class efforts for students? We used an empirical model to test the trade-off hypothesis between these two efforts. We identified a trade-off between in-class and out-of-class efforts, especially for…

Over 20 years ago, the late William Zahka (1990, 1998) outlined how the acceptance speeches of those who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science could be used to teach undergraduates. This article updates and expands Zahka's work, identifying some of the issues discussed by recent Nobel Laureates, classifying their speeches by topic…

The authors conducted an empirical examination of the relationship between extra-normal ability (inability) in principles of economics courses and student performance in the various areas of the business discipline such as finance, marketing, management, and accounting. Extra-normal ability is defined as the part of an economics grade that cannot…

The authors outline a pair of classroom activities designed to provide an intuitive foundation to the theoretical introduction of advertising in monopoly markets. The roles of both informative and persuasive advertising are covered. Each student acts as a monopolist and chooses the number of (costly) advertisements and the price. The experiments…

Consider an auction in which one potential buyer wishes to participate, but the other potential buyer would rather the bidding not start. However, once bidding starts, the reluctant firm participates (submits "bluff bids") simply to make the eventual winner pay more. This incentive exists when the marginal effect of the winning bid is to increase…