Using outside readings to help students understand what economists do

ABSTRACT

How does one learn how to think like an economist without understanding what economists do? Using outside readings can be an effective and straightforward pedagogical tool to teach economic concepts and to expose students to the wide range of topics and methods economists use in their research. Improving students’ understanding of what economists do is particularly important for increasing diversity in the field. The author of this article describes a formal approach to incorporate news articles in an introductory microeconomics course with two basic goals: to help students learn economics by applying economic concepts to the world they live in and to increase diversity in economics by exposing students to a broader set of topics studied by economists that better reflect their interests.

Keywords:

• Current events
• diversity in economics
• microeconomics instruction
• news articles

JEL codes:

• A10; A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Sam Allgood and KimMarie McGoldrick for their thoughtful comments.

Notes

1 Other useful resources include The Upshot, In Her Words, and EconoFact. The Upshot is a New York Times Web site with analysis and data visualizations about everyday life (https://www.nytimes.com/section/upshot). In Her Words is a twice-weekly newsletter on women, gender and society, also produced by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/series/in-her-words). EconoFact is a nonpartisan publication designed to bring key facts and incisive analysis to the national debate on economic and social policies (https://econofact.org/). It provides short memos, written by academic economists from across the country, that are accessible to a wide audience.

2 Using a single online document to be shared with all students allows the instructor to monitor students’ progress in the breakout rooms. The document should contain pages separated by group that can be filled with the group participants’ names and their answers. For larger classes, this strategy helps expanding and assessing classroom participation. The process tries to mimic in-person group discussions as closely as possible.

3 See Bayer et al. (2020) for a new introductory course being taught at Harvard that focuses on practical skills to solve real-world problems, like introducing students to issues of inequality using the Opportunity Atlas (https://www.opportunityatlas.org/). Some recent textbooks in economics have also tried to take a more practical approach in teaching economics (The CORE Team (2017); Bowles and Carlin (2020). Bayer and Wilcox (2019) provide a summary of other resources and recommendations.