My dissertation research concentrates on the causes, motivations, and results of electricity restructuring, and research on the effectiveness of economic teaching and retention. The first chapter looks at motivations for electricity restructuring in the United States in terms of the Interest Group and Public Interest setting. The second chapter…

Love it or hate it, assessment has become the new reality on college and university campuses. Although measuring student achievement of course outcomes is not an easy task, assessment does not need to be a complex or painful experience. This paper describes the methods used to assess student achievement of the stated course outcomes in…

This research develops a narrative of incidents of intentional learning by students studying undergraduate economics as represented in their written reflective journals. The deliberate integration of learner reflection, reflective practice and reflective writing into the pedagogy may facilitate transfer learning (Sousa, 2006). Transfer has been…

One of the most important challenges facing college instructors of economics is helping students engage. Engagement is particularly important in a large-enrollment Principles of Economics course, where it can help students achieve a long-lived understanding of how economists use basic economic ideas to look at the world. The author reports how…

College instructors and students participated in a pilot project at the University of Akron to enhance student learning through the use of a common teaching pedagogy, peer instruction. The teaching pedagogy was supported by the use of technology, an electronic personal response system, which recorded student responses. The authors report their…

America's colleges and universities have long been the envy of the world. But it would be hard to think of a time when the public has viewed American higher education with greater skepticism. It is a tragedy that colleges and universities are increasingly characterized by their high costs, not their high standards. This fifth edition of…

Economics is usually perceived as a difficult subject among undergraduate students and the literature suggests that the student's problems with principles of economics are mainly related to the chalk and talk type of teaching, the simplicity of economic models, limited discussions on current economic issues, and on race, gender, and other types of…

Calibrated Peer Review[TM] (CPR) is a web-based instructional tool that encourages "writing gain for students" without adding "grading pain for the instructor!" The use of CPR provides students frequent opportunities to hone both writing as well as peer review skills in a guided environment. And once an assignment is authored, instructors have…

This paper reports on the perceptions of teaching economists of the nature, implementation and result of outcomes assessment/assurance of learning (AOL) in higher education. The results reported in the paper are based on over eight hundred responses to a web-based survey of teaching economists. While there is little consensus among economists…

The number of contact hours, one of the important institutional context factors, was examined and compared between Dutch and Vietnamese higher education at institute and student levels in Psychology and Business and/or Economics specializations. The quantity of contact hours per credit point given by institutions was investigated in a number of…

This article presents empirical results of explorative case studies that examine whether the New Public Management mechanisms have improved the academic performance of PhD education in selected German and European economics departments. Our data rely on document analyses of organisational variables and in-depth semi-structured interviews with…

This paper reports on a pilot study that involved introducing writing tutors or writing fellows into a compulsory, third-year economics course with the intent of incorporating both writing across the curriculum and writing intensive elements. The connections and interrelationships between writing and writing intensive courses are set out briefly…

This paper reports experiment results of teaching large classes of introductory economics with modern learning technology such as MyEconLab or Aplia. This new technology emerges partially in response to the enrollment pressure currently facing many institutions of higher education. Among other things, the technology provides an integrated online…

Over the past several decades, colleges and universities have moved away from the traditional chalk-and-talk lecture. Professors have experimented with a myriad of methods to engage students more fully. Some of the innovations that have been used have succeeded in improving student performance and satisfaction. In this paper we report the learning…

Many instructors in subjects such as economics are frequently concerned with how to teach technical material to undergraduate students with limited mathematical backgrounds. One method that has proven successful for the authors is to connect theoretically sophisticated material with actual data. This enables students to see how the theory relates…