QuickTake: Awesome Tool to Teach the Federal Budget Deficit

Thanks to the Williams College links page I've become acquainted with the National Budget Simulator. This is a tool any instructor of macroeconomics would find valuable and easy to use. Instructors can use the simulator to provide students with an in-class demonstration of how difficult it is to balance the federal budget. Highly recommended.

The Best Seat in the House? Student Learning and Classroom Seating Patterns

I teach most of my classes in a shoebox--one that's about 150 feet long and half as wide! Nearly 300 students crammed into that shoebox, by the way. Students in the back row are not only sitting 150 feet away from me, but because the classroom is tiered upward, they are one floor above me!! From the teaching station it's impossible to describe in any detail those sitting in the back rows. Common sense would suggest there are implications for teaching and learning.

I know that students are advised to "sit toward the front" to increase their learning, but obviously not everyone can sit in the first few rows. Too many students and not enought rows. Learners with vision or hearing problems are likely to want to sit toward the front. Other students know from experience that sitting toward the front gets them higher grades. What of the others?

Most instructors have a gut feeling about seating patterns and grades. Students who sit toward the front are usually the better students and students who sit toward the back are usually the ones with the lowest grades. Is there empirical evidence to prove this gut feeling? If anyone knows of a paper on the subject, please leave a comment. If the paper is available online, I'll go back and provide a link to it in this posting. I'd like to know if there is cause and effect or self selection. Does sitting in the back cause less learning to occur or do students with less ability choose to sit in the back?

I'll bet I could really shake up some students by choosing one student every class period from the back rows and inviting that student to come down and sit in the first or second row. Would that be too mean?

An Award for an Excellent Resources Page

The Royal Economics Academy Award of Excellence

This award is being given to the Department of Economics at Williams College in recognition of their outstanding page of links to economic resources useful in economics instruction. I was not formerly acquainted with many of the links provided. The resources page can be accessed by clicking here. I'll be giving out more of these awards as I find other Economics Departments that do an excellent job of providing accessible online materials that facilitate the teaching of economics. Thanks, Williams College.

The Price of Gasoline--What If I Don't Wanna Ride the Bus?

It's no surprise to an economist that higher gas prices could lead to less driving:

. . . in an Associated Press-AOL poll conducted last Monday through Wednesday, 58 percent of Americans said they have reduced the amount of driving they do as a result of recent increases in energy prices

To repeat the point made in my earlier posting, higher gas prices should lead to a reduction in the quantity demanded. That's a movement up the demand curve for gas, not a leftward shift in the curve.

The most interesting point in the story is that the use of public transit is up, at least in some parts of the country. We teach this all the time in Economics 101: When the price of X rises, the demand for substitute Y increases (shifts to the right).

I don't like buses, but apparently some people do. They're noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable. Unless the price of gas hits the stratosphere, most people will probably avoid the cheaper substitute provided by public transit, so that rightward shift in demand for public transit might not be very far to the right. In the meantime, rather than ride the bus, I'll confine my contact to looking at pictures of buses.

Hybrid Car Sales Up as Gas Prices Reach Record Highs

I don't know much about hybrid cars other than that they cost way more than their traditional siblings. On the one hand, I've read that they purportedly offer purchasers high gas mileage. On the other hand, I've read that buyers of hybrids have been disappointed in the actual miles per gallon.

The one thing about hybrids that makes the most sense to me is that their sales are headed upward at a fast clip. Because hybrids are relatively new and not many models are offered, they still make up only about 1 percent of all new vehicles sold. Pay no mind to that number, though, because proponents of hybrids see a rosy future for them. R. L. Polk, the firm that collects data on auto sales, explains the popularity of hybrids this way:

. . . federal and state tax credits for fuel-efficient vehicles have helped spur hybrid sales. More people also are buying into the idea that driving a hybrid is socially responsible . . .

I think the key motivation driving hybrid sales is ignored by that explanation. High gas prices always increase the demand for more fuel efficient vehicles. In the 1970s Ford's Pinto and Chevy's Vega rode the crest of the wave of rising gas prices to the winner's circle. Those vehicles were quietly discontinued when it became apparent that they were trouble prone. I wonder how reliable is the hybrid technology. The economics of hybrids is already pretty iffy given the higher initial purchase cost. If they prove trouble prone and costly to repair, consumer demand for fuel efficiency may have to be satisfied in some other way. Check out the cool 1958 GoGoMobil converted to electric power at this link. For a look at the full line of GoGoMobils, go here. Back to the future, anyone?

Reporters ALWAYS Get This Wrong!

The headline blares, "Gas Prices Down on Lower Demand." What caused that lower demand, according to the story? The higher price of gas, of course. Do I detect circular reasoning here?

Every good principles of economics text emphasizes the distinction between a change in demand and a change in quantity demanded. Newspaper reporters must have slept through Economics 101 the day that topic was covered.

What the reporter in the linked story was trying to say is that the higher price of gas reduced the quantity demanded. Of course, the source quoted in the story, the Lundberg Report, fed the reporter the wrong interpretation of events:

This is the first significant price drop in retail gasoline this year,"said Lundberg. It's not possible to quantify, but demand for gasoline is surely being dampened by high prices to a level lower than it would have been.

Here's an easy homework assignment or quick in-class assignment for your Economics 101 students. Give students the quote and ask them to tell you what's wrong.

Always Assessment

When I was in college they were called tests. Now, in the teaching and learning field the idea of assessment has gobbled up the concept of testing and spit it back at faculty to emphasize the distinction between formative assessment and summative assessment. One paper I found useful puts it this way:

. . . teachers can build in many opportunities to assess how students are learning and then use this information to make beneficial changes in instruction. This diagnostic use of assessment to provide feedback to teachers and students over the course of instruction is called formative assessment. It stands in contrast to summative assessment, which generally takes place after a period of instruction and requires making a judgment about the learning that has occurred (e.g., by grading or scoring a test or paper).

The ability of students to practice the "economic way of thinking" is probably on the list of goals, implicitly or explicitly, for every Economics 101 class. In an economics class formative assessment is as important as summative assessment in motivating students to learn. At least that's my experience.

A simple formative assessment technique is The Muddiest Point, alternatively called The One-Minute Paper. The technique is easy to implement and it works. I've been doing it for years, off and on. The trick is to actually get meaningful feedback rather than the stock reply "everything clear." In other words, students have to be prompted to think hard about whether they've really mastered the concepts. When the instructor follows up with a report at the beginning of the next class as to what concepts were the muddiest and gives students the another chance to learn those concepts before the class moves on, students see the value.

Eye-Hand Coordination: Don't Just Look, Draw

I've never seen this issue taken up in the literature, but I nonetheless firmly believe that students learn graphs best by drawing them AFTER seeing them drawn accurately by the instructor. That idea may seem obvious, but I wonder how many PowerPoint-enhanced classes skip the step where the instructor draws the graph first.

The problem is that PowerPoint slides, often prepared by publishers as part of a textbook package, present beautifully drawn graphs ALLatONCE. The instructor clicks the mouse, the graph appears, and the students frantically scribble the graph into their notes. The whole graph is often more information than the brain can absorb, though. The result is that the graph is drawn incorrectly in the students' notes.

Doesn't it make sense that if the students can sit back and observe the instructor's hand in motion and hear the instructor's thoughts as the graph is drawn, the students are going to generate a more accurate rendering in their notes.

Here's my challenge to you, the instructor: While the classroom is filling up before the start of class, ask the students if you can see their notebooks. Observe the graphs drawn by the students in their notes when you present the graphs by PowerPoint slide. I'll bet you'll find a significant number of errors. As an experiment, draw the graphs yourself before showing them on a slide. Then followup with an examination of student's notebooks.

Let me know the results of the experiment.