https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6540-9435
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ABSTRACT
The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside readings and writing assignments leads to increased student engagement, high rates of self-reported reading, and high satisfaction with the course without imposing an unreasonable grading workload on the instructor. This model may be especially useful to instructors in intermediate and advanced courses who seek to increase students’ exposure to recent developments in their field and strengthen their ability to engage critically with economic theory and ideas.
Acknowledgment
Many thanks to Delaney Courcelle for excellent research assistance.
Notes
Notes
1 Future versions of this course will allocate additional class time to instruction and practice with interpreting regressions.
2 The survey question did not restrict students’ total to 33 readings, and some totals exceeded the number of reading responses. Restricting to responses that totaled 33, students on average said that they “thoroughly” did the readings 71 percent of the time, and they did about half 17 percent of the time.
3 This task was made easier for students because David Evans and Alemina Music posted one-sentence summaries of each paper after the conference (Evans and Music Citation2019), which served as a user-friendly “preview” when choosing papers.
4 Students could instead watch an alternative pre-recorded seminar if their schedules conflicted.
5 Asking students to embed the word count in their reading response saves a lot of grading time in larger classes.