Chalk and Talk: A National Survey on Teaching Undergraduate Economics

Abstract

Reports on the desirable goals and characteristics of economics programs, and reforms proposed to attain such programs (e.g., W. Lee Hansen, 1991; Hirschel Kasper et al., 1991), have ignored the issue of how economics is to be taught. That is surprising because several popular trade books have recently appeared condemning teaching practices at American colleges and universities. Some of these books were written by economists (e.g., Martin Anderson's [1992] Impostors in the Temple) and used economics courses as notable examples of these problems. Long before these reports and books appeared, the National Council on Economic Education (NCEE), together with the American Economic Association's (AEA) Committee on Economic Education, began sponsoring programs to improve the teaching of economics and to promote innovative teaching methods. In Becker and Watts (1995), we describe many of these improvements and explain how economists could use alternative teaching methods in different undergraduate courses. Until now, however, we could not provide data on how widely those approaches were used. We do that here, based on responses to a national survey.'