Students' persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles

ABSTRACT

Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.

KEYWORDS:

• Beliefs
• cognitive bias
• economic education
• psychology
• teaching of economics

JEL CODES:

• A12
• A20
• I21

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to Jordi Brandts for very insightful discussions on economic misconceptions and cognitive biases, and to two anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments.

Funding

Busom, Lopez-Mayan and Panadés acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (projects ECO2015-67999-R; ECO2013-44920-P and ECO2015-67602, respectively). Busom and Panadés also acknowledge support from the Generalitat de Catalunya (projects 2014SGR-327 and 2014SGR-803, respectively).

Notes

1. See Allgood, Walstad, and Siegfried (2015) for an extensive survey of research on teaching economics to undergraduates.

2. S&Z used the Chicago Booth FTI survey and the EEP of the Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) (http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel). Gordon and Dahl (2013) also used the EEP to discuss differences in views among economists.

3. Confirmation bias is the tendency to prefer corroborative rather than refuting evidence on one's beliefs. See Kahneman (2011, 80–81).

4. Cipriani, Lubian, and Zago (2009) analyzed the effect of economic training on Italian students' responses to a small number of questions that raise efficiency and fairness tradeoffs. They compared students in different grades, not the same group of students over time.

5. The issues of how children and people learn, misconceptions, differences between how experts and nonexperts organize knowledge, and implications for the design of learning environments was the subject of a book sponsored by the U.S. National Research Council (Bradsford, Brown, and Cocking 1999).

6. Carl Wieman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. He currently holds a joint appointment at the Department of Physics and the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for bringing his work to our attention.

7. In Spain, first-year college students enroll directly in a specific major; they can switch fields subsequently.

8. For example, Essentials of Economics (Krugman, Wells, and Graddy); Principles of Economics (Mankiw); or Economics (Samuelson and Nordhaus). They are all available in Spanish.

9. The statement read, “Local ordinances that limit rent increases for some rental housing units, such as in New York and San Francisco, have had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.”

10. In the questionnaire for law students, we added a statement about subsidies for buying cars being beneficial for society. We found that a substantially higher percentage of male than female students agreed with the statement, fitting the stereotype that men care more about cars than women.

11. Details about this comparison can be provided to interested readers upon request.

12. We asked our colleagues teaching Economics of Information to senior economics majors to let us run the survey during one of their lectures. Students were told we were running an opinion survey that was unrelated to their coursework and would not have any impact on course grades. Fifty-eight students took the survey.

13. Their data sources were a Gallup survey of a national random sample of 300 college seniors and the economics scores for 12,854 students who took the Major Field Test in Business II (MFTB).

14. Increasing student dedication may still be a desirable goal. This would possibly call for redesigning incentives. See Azmat and colleagues (2016) for an experiment on the effect of providing students with feedback on their relative performance.

15. For instance, the length of a line between two outward pointing arrows, or between inward pointing arrows, is perceived to be different, when it is, in fact, identical. Using a ruler would prevent us from making this mistake.

16. Paul A. Samuelson warned about fallacies in the introductory chapter of his Economics textbook, thus calling for using the scientific approach in economic analysis.