Teaching economics of climate change and sustainability as an introductory interdisciplinary elective using critical reading of supplementary sources

Abstract

Critical thinking skills are widely considered to be important transferable skills gained from taking college-level economics courses that are also highly valued by employers. Yet, the literature on intentionally teaching critical thinking skills in undergraduate economics classes is still relatively sparse. The author of this article outlines an innovative approach to teaching critical thinking skills through class participation activities designed to promote critical reading of outside sources in an interdisciplinary climate economics course. The course goal is to equip students with the skills to articulate how economists contribute to the thinking on climate change and apply basic economics tools to explain and evaluate climate policy.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• critical reading and thinking
• supplementary reading
• teaching climate economics

JEL code:

• A2

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Nirupama Devaraj at Valparaiso University, IN, for generously sharing her knowledge on teaching strategies and tools over the years, including the online peer interaction tool Perusall, and her students in ECON 337 in the spring 2020 semester for staying with the course despite the unique challenges of the “suddenly remote” semester.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This activity was completed in the second half of the spring 2020 semester when instruction had moved online. Students completed the activity in the allotted time with little to no assistance from the instructor, illustrating the ease of trying a similar approach to provide active learning experiences when teaching online. Students’ familiarity with class participation tickets in the first half of the spring 2020 semester might explain why they were able to complete the activity with little assistance.

1 As reported on the college and the 2021 U.S. News & World Report Rankings Web sites.

2 In spring 2020, students discussed articles and reports using Perusall, an online tool for facilitating peer-peer and peer-instructor interactions. Student engagement on the site can be tracked and graded relatively easily compared to doing the same via an LMS such as Blackboard. Students created free Perusall accounts and could access the Web site via a link posted on the course Blackboard site.

3 See Greenlaw and Deloach (2003) for a discussion on designing and assessing online discussions on economics topics to improve both the quantity of peer engagement and quality of comments.

4 Group members are typically randomly selected to report out results of short, structured in-class participation activities. For longer activities that have more component parts, a dedicated representative can be selected by the group members to share answers.

5 Anecdotally, the benefit to students from adding such critical reading and discussion activities includes improved engagement with the course, better answers on exams, cogent and (sometimes) high-level arguments in class discussions and projects, to overall improvement in value-added from taking the course.

6 Self- and peer-grading techniques have been used in past iterations of this class to evaluate lower-stakes, short written activities. For peer-grading, written responses were swapped between groups where peer groups would look over and rate responses on a check+, check, check− basis following class discussion. A similar response rating system also was used for self-grading. Students in both instances were briefly prepped on the criterion for assigning check+, check, check−.

7 See Yuretich () for ideas on deploying and measuring active learning activities to promote critical thinking in large introductory classes.

8 Dubas and Toledo discuss specifically linking higher-order critical thinking activities to course learning outcomes in a principles-level course, but their strategy can be relatively easily adapted to fit critical reading and discussion activities in higher-level economics courses.