LEARNING ECONOMICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN INVESTIGATION CONCERNING THE QUALITY AND IMPACT OF EXPERTISE

This article reflects the results of an investigation involving economics and law students and focusing on the quality and impact of their expertise (or prior knowledge) in relation to the course, Economics and Money. Attention was paid in this project to the construction of different tests intended to grasp the complex nature of prior knowledge at the content level. In relation to the quality of expertise, the results of this project could reveal that economics and law students possess a composite of different expertise components. In relation to the impact of prior knowledge on the acquisition of subject‐oriented knowledge, regression analysis shows that expertise accounts for 16 to 17 percent of the variance in posttest scores. Although this percentage is limited, further analysis could reveal that optimal requisite knowledge and mathematics are important in this perspective. These results are important since they might be helpful in order to guide future initiatives to support students in the initial stages of their studies to cope with the demands of specific domains to be studied. In this study, study time was also used as an independent variable to hypothesize about differences in expertise in the impact on the acquisition of new subject matter. No significant findings could be derived to support hypotheses in this context.