Student engagement and interaction in the economics classroom: Essentials for the novice economic educator

Abstract

Faculty often report limited student engagement in their economics courses. This deficiency makes it challenging for educators to excite students about our field, a situation that could have ripple effects in terms of the number of students who graduate as economics majors. For students, the lack of classroom engagement makes it unappealing to attend lectures and may hamper their learning outcomes. This article offers essential ideas, tools, activities, and resources that have been carefully filtered, curated, and annotated to lower the startup costs for new economic educators to maximize student engagement and interactions in their economics classrooms. Additionally, the resources presented in this article can be leveraged by more seasoned educators looking for ways to take their teaching to the next level.

Keywords:

• Economics classroom
• student engagement
• teaching methods

JEL CODE:

• A22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The quinquennial survey offers two major categories of questions: “Teaching Methods” and “Assessment and Grading.” Within the teaching methods category, respondents are asked to use a scale to indicate how often they use a particular method. The term “Chalk” relates to the question asking about the use of “Chalkboard or Whiteboard” in the economics classroom, while the term “Talk” relates to the question asking about the use of “Traditional Lectures.”

2 While the more common way of implementing the one-minute paper is asking feedback questions at the end of a class period, some instructors prefer to ask those questions at the beginning of the next class period. This latter approach requires students to identify what is the most important thing they learned and what is the muddiest point still remaining from the previous class period.