Don’t just read the news, write the news! — A course about writing economics for the media

Abstract

The author of this article describes an upper-level economics course where students learn to write economic news articles, which improves communication and audience-targeting skills. The course was created in partnership with a media outlet and designed around authentic assessments to provide students with a genuine experience based on academic and journalistic standards. The interactive nature of the course allows students to benefit from workshops, one-on-one discussions, and peer-learning. Articles target a general audience and must convincingly address a piece of economic news. Students must apply the theoretical knowledge accumulated in preceding economics courses to analyze and explain real-world situations. If students can meet the media partner’s standards, they are offered the opportunity to publish their articles.

Keywords:

• Authentic assessment
• engagement
• experiential learning
• literacy-targeted
• media
• writing

JEL Codes:

• A20
• A22

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Scott Simkins, Faithe Picault, the two anonymous referees, as well as participants of the AEA Committee on Economic Education’s Poster Session at the 2019 ASSA meetings and of the 2019 Conference on Teaching & Research on Economic Education for many valuable comments. This course could not have been developed without the support and the participation of the author’s media partner KelownaNow, and especially Jim Csek, Josh Duncan, Samantha Hill, and Karen Montgomery. The author thanks to students in the Winter 2018’s and Winter 2019’s sections of the “Economics and the Media” course at UBC Okanagan.

Notes

1 McGoldrick (2008) suggests economics students need more opportunities to apply economics skills and to improve communication skills throughout the curriculum.

2 See Caviglia-Harris (2020) and Schmeiser (2017) for a description of the literature on teaching writing skills to economics students.

3 Hackman and Oldham (1975) define “task identity” as the degree to which the job requires completion of a "whole" and identifiable piece of work—that is, doing a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome; and “task significance” as the degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people—whether in the immediate organization or in the external environment.

4 An example of similar collaboration can be found in Al-Bahrani et al. (2017).

5 See Villarroel et al. (2018) for more details about authentic assessments, benefits, and specific course designs.

6 Allgood and Bayer (2016, 2017) provide a taxonomy specifically created to evaluate the learning of five essential competencies for economics graduates.

7 The most classical taxonomy is Bloom et al. (1956) that categorizes six different levels from the least to the most effective for students’ content assimilation: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation (20–24). “Economics and the Media” was created for students to promote learning at the four upper levels (Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation). As students already completed economics courses before taking this one, they were already extensively exposed to the two lower levels of this taxonomy.

8 Bosshardt and Walstad (2018) and Goedde-Menke, Erner, and Oberste (2017) show the importance of basic economics concepts in individuals’ financial decisions, and Davies (2006) describes the benefits of economics literacy to citizens’ education.

9 On a few occasions, students were permitted to write a longer text when required for publication.

10 As explained in Hall and Podemska-Mikluch (2015), writing short articles is actually benefitting students. In addition to the benefits they describe, I would add that students are given more chance to correct and improve their writing skills as they can spend time to correct and enhance each and every sentence and sometimes words.

11 See article:

https://www.kelownanow.com/watercooler/news/news/UBCO/KelownaNow_and_UBCO_wrap_up_successful_1st_term_of_new_partnership/

Additional information

Funding

The author also thanks the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences for the 2017 Curricular Innovation Award, as well as students in the Winter 2018’s and Winter 2019’s sections of the “Economics and the Media” course at UBC Okanagan.