In this symposium, the author comments on an article written about critical thinking in economics. The author leans toward the view that undergraduate economics should continue to be focused around core tenets and basic models--what the article refers to as little-think critical thinking--while, at the same time, students should be given clear…

The author has long thought that the role of instructors in the introductory economics classroom is to serve as ambassadors for the economic profession. They are there not to present their own views of economics. They should, instead, transcend their idiosyncrasies and represent the broad consensus of professional economists. The job of the…

Chew and Cerbin (2021) outline nine cognitive challenges to student learning with which economic educators are likely familiar, even if the language used to describe them differs. In this article, the authors refrain from summarizing Chew and Cerbin's framework and instead focus on providing context for how those conducting research and developing…

Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a fruitful way of thinking deeply about teaching economics. In this article, the author offers several ideas on how to offload parts of three of the cognitive challenges they identify to an online module that any instructor could assign to their students. Ideally, this module would be described in an economics…

Learning-focused teaching must take into account students' cognitive processes. Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a conceptual framework based on nine interacting cognitive challenges faced by students to guide instructors toward teaching practices that provide the best opportunities for students to learn. The goal of this guideline article is to…

Crowley and Swan (2018) proposed a categorisation of economic citizenship, in which they extend earlier work to include a new type, the discerning economic citizen. I argue that the discerning economic citizen is not a distinct type from the other three (the personally responsible economic citizen, the participatory economic citizen, and the…

In "Opportunity Cost: A Reexamination," Professor Parkin contrasts forgone physical quantities with forgone values as measures of the opportunity cost of basic economic decisions. The impetus for his study stems from an experiment conducted by Ferraro and Taylor (2005), in which professional economists could not reach a consensus over…

Rod O'Donnell writes here that there is a wide and deep confusion in contemporary economics about the concept and role of opportunity cost (OC). O'Donnell states that his main grounds for making this claim are the muddled, variable, and sometimes conflicting treatments of OC in modern textbooks; the disturbing empirical results in surveys of both…

In our previous work (Crowley & Swan, 2018), we extended the three citizenship categories (personally responsible, participatory, justice-oriented) created by Westheimer and Kahne into the realm of economic citizenship. In doing so, we added a fourth citizenship archetype: the discerning economic citizen. In a comment on our original article,…

The author's objective for this reply in reexamining opportunity cost was to draw attention to two conflicting definitions of the concept in current use and to argue the case for dropping one of them. The comments of Daniel Arce, Rod O'Donnell, and Daniel Stone might be read as demonstration that the author has failed on both counts. Such a…

Carlos Asarta comments here that Arbaugh, Fornaciari, and Hwang (2016) are to be commended for their work ("Identifying Research Topic Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory" "Journal of Management Education," Dec 2016, see EJ1118407). Asarta says that they make several…

The 11th International Conference of the International Association for Citizenship, Social and Economics Education IACSEE, took place the 2nd-4th of July 2015 at Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen, Germany. The conference addressed the role and potential of citizenship, social and economic education, both theoretically and empirically in the…

The circular flow of income diagram is a simplified representation of the functioning of a free-market economic system. It illustrates how businesses interact with the other economic participants within the key macroeconomic markets that coordinate the flow of income through the national economy. Therefore, it can provide students of business with…

Economics is a two-faced discipline. It claims to be a science, describing the world without preconception or value judgment. The reality is that descriptive economics has been shaped by a framework of assumptions geared more to its normative message than to its pretensions. The self-interested individual--who rationally calculates how to achieve…

There never seems to be enough time to teach everything that administrators, policy advocates, parents, legislators, and the general public think should be addressed in the elementary classroom. Each year, elementary teachers are asked to add more and more to their already crowded curriculum. Add to this the pressures of state standards and making…