What do we want students to (know and) be able to do: Learning outcomes, competencies, and content in literacy-targeted principles courses

Abstract

Using the backward design model, the author of this article surveys and connects the economic competencies literature evolving from Hansen with the literature on literacy-targeted principles courses. He makes the case why departments should offer LT principles courses—which focus on higher-level mastery of a shorter list of concepts that students can apply throughout their lives—explains what students should be able to do after taking LT courses, and differentiates LT principles from existing “intro for non-majors” or “survey” courses. The author intends the article as a starting point for anyone interested in exploring or assessing the LT approach and suggests options for departments thinking about integrating LT principles into their course offerings.

Keywords:

• Competencies
• economic education
• economic literacy
• Hansen proficiencies
• literacy-targeted (LT)
• principles of economics

JEL CODES:

• A2
• A20
• A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Wendy Stock, Scott Wolla, and JEE referees for prompting substantial improvements to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The course design literature is full of paired synonyms for the contrasting goals of to know versus to do—explain/use, theory/application, ideas/practice, knowledge/proficiencies, understand/capacities, and concepts/competencies.

2 Using survey data, Walstad and Allgood (2005, 181) find

that greater opportunity to teach was viewed by economics professors as an inconsequential reason to change a job. Almost seven in 10 economics professors rated it as not important. This response was greater than for any other group of professors. The disparity was greatest (29–35 percentage points) when economists’ responses are compared with those of professors in computer science, engineering, or business. The rating differences were less, but still substantial (14–19 percentage points) when compared with professors in the social, biological, or physical sciences, or mathematics and statistics. The results … suggest that economics professors have the least interest in teaching among professors in all science disciplines.

In contrast to economics, Goffe (2021, 1) highlights the prominence of education research throughout the discipline of physics: 92 U.S. physics departments have a physics education research group; 516 physicists at PhD-granting schools are active in physics education and have 156 PhD students; the summer program of the 2019 conference of the American Association of Physics Teachers lists 900 physicists and 144 advertised postdoc positions in physics education research between 2008 and 2015.

3 Hansen did not complete Stage 3—teaching and learning activities—of the backward design process. The Goffe and Wolla (2024) article in this issue, “Cognitive Science Teaching Strategies and Literacy-Targeted Economics Complementarities,” discusses the Stage 3 literature.

4 Hansen’s first proficiency—access existing knowledge—is mostly about what students should know, rather than be able to do.

5 Hansen’s concerns about TUCE inadequately assessing higher-order thinking skills were preceded by Yates (1978), who was among the first to question whether concept testing—what students know—captures the higher-order proficiencies of what we want students to be able to do.

6 For more on TUCE, see Siegfried and Fels (1979), Walstad and Rebeck (2008), and Welsh and Fels (1969).

7 Siegfried et al. (1991, 201–2) promoted the goal (shared with other disciplines) of the economics major “to empower students with a self-sustaining capacity to think and learn, and to take an active role in their education. They should know how to pose questions, collect information, identify and use an appropriate framework to analyze that information, and come to some conclusion. The end result is to qualify students to make informed decisions about their lives and communities long after their college experience.”

“[T]o evaluate our success in educating majors to better understand how to think like economists, we need to identify how to measure the proficiencies of students in doing such thinking” (Siegfried et. al. 1991, 214).

8 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/higher-education-credit-framework-for-england#

9 The five AHELO general learning outcomes are not identical to the six QAA proficiencies, and three of the five outcomes are paired with multiple (2 to 5) assessments. Where there was choice, we selected the AHELO assessment that most closely matched the QAA proficiency. The complete AHELO list is on pp. 28–29 in OECD (2011).

10 The phrase one-and-done is shorthand for those principles students who do not take any economics courses beyond a survey, principles, or other introductory economics course. Estimates of the percentage of principles students becoming economics majors at four-year colleges range between 2 and 20 percent (Hansen, Salemi, and Siegfried 2002; Colander and McGoldrick 2009a; Allgood, Walstad, and Siegfried 2015). Stock (2024) finds that when community college students, who account for 50 percent of all college student enrollments in principles, are included, 74 percent of all students never take any economics. Of those who take at least one economics course, only 2.2 percent become majors, while 11.8 percent (including majors) take four or more economics courses.

11 Saunders (1980), Salemi and Siegfried (1999) and Hansen, Salemi and Siegfried (2002) all quote Stigler (1963). Fels (1967, 660) reports that the development of TUCE was motivated, in part, by Stigler’s comments.

12 Recent examples of social issues survey textbooks include Stock (2013) and Register and Grimes (2016).

13 Cohen’s courses had 34 contact hours over 12 weeks each semester, for a total of 68 hours. Salemi’s one-semester course had a total of 58 contact hours over 14 weeks.

14 “Requiring students to answer a battery of largely single-dimensional, multiple-choice questions, as occurs in most principles courses … neither challenges students to begin thinking like economists nor builds their ability to use what they are learning” (Hansen 2001, 232).

15 Hoyt (2023) has a thoughtful discussion of which concepts to include, with connections to all three stages of backward design.

Salemi (2005, 50) says, “I drop from the first course concepts that students are unlikely to use later in life, especially when those concepts are technically demanding.” He goes on to say that

Although the reader’s list is likely to be different, my first-course students do not study cost curves (ATC, MC, AVC and AFC). The only graphs they encounter are demand and supply graphs and the production possibilities frontier. They learn the difference between price-taking and non-competitive behavior but not noncompetitive industry structures. They do not study elasticity formulas but do know the revenue test for elasticity. They do not study national income accounts or multiplier formulas. They learn that monetary policy takes the form of an interest rate rule but do not worry about the mechanics of money creation….I retain comparison of marginal costs and marginal benefits because that is an essential feature of the economic approach to decision making….Students use the idea that firms try to enter profitable industries and exit unprofitable ones. But they will not use the fact that the MC curve cuts the ATC curve at its minimum.

While Salemi’s exclusions may seem extreme to someone not familiar with the LT approach, note that he was the longstanding chair of the AEA Committee on Economic Education, and not an instructor on the fringe of the discipline.

16 Colander and McGoldrick (2009a, 617) make a slightly different argument for letting individual instructors choose their own short list. “Education is a personal process, involving a connection between the professor and the student. That connection comes about best when the professor is teaching about that which he or she is passionate. Thus, professors should retain their property rights over what is taught and how it is taught.” While advocating for much of the LT approach, they go on to say that “In our view, it is better to have what we might consider the ‘wrong, more technical’ content taught passionately than the ‘right’ content taught perfunctorily. It is this perspective that has driven so much of [the Teagle] report and its focus on broader questions of institutional structure”

17 Both studies acknowledge that the difficult question of how to directly measure improved economic literacy remains unanswered—”[…] whether completing a literacy-targeted principles course has a detectable and positive impact on economic literacy. We leave that work for the future” (Gilleskie and Salemi 2012, 128).