Designing effective assessments in economics courses: Guiding principles

Abstract

Used correctly, assessments play a vital role in the success of a course: they provide valuable feedback to students regarding their knowledge gaps, encourage deeper understanding of the material, help students to develop critical thinking, and guide students to accomplish a course’s learning goals. They also provide a signal to future employers, graduate programs, or future course instructors about the quality of a student’s understanding of the material. Used incorrectly, assessments likely achieve none of these. To avoid the latter outcome, this article’s author helps new instructors by (1) summarizing pedagogical theory of sound assessment design, (2) applying it to assessment design in economics courses, and (3) assembling examples of assessments from the economics literature for instructors who may wish to experiment with different assignments.

Keywords:

• Assessments
• critical thinking
• economics
• grading
• pedagogy

JEL CODES:

• A2
• A20
• A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Chris Clapp, Joe Hardwick, Nazanin Khazra, Hyunmin Park, and the members and participants of the 2022 AEA session “If You Only Had Two Hours—Best Advice for New Instructors of Economics” for their insightful comments and perspectives on early drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The original Perry framework in Perry et al. (1968) and Perry (1970) developed nine positions to organize relationships between students and their understanding of knowledge, solutions, and authority (“the instructor” in this article) based on the male undergraduate Harvard students. Belenky et al. (1986) refined the Perry framework into the “Women’s Way of Knowing” framework (WWK) by placing the nine positions into four aggregated levels and adding a level of complete disconnect from knowledge (“silence”), resulting from their studies incorporating women of a variety of ages (16–60), educational history, socio-economic class, and ethnicity. This article presents the hybrid of the two frameworks, WWK + Perry, which merges the two frameworks (“levels” and “positions”) and interprets them in the context of a standard economics class environment (table 2). The WWK model is helpful in the simplicity of having only four levels encountered in higher education settings (individuals in level zero don’t seek higher education) and is helpful as the starting point for a new instructor trying to determine their students’ critical thinking development. However, the granularity of the Perry model can help further hone interventions and highlights the variation of behavior possible even within a level (early multiplicity and late multiplicity, for example).