Survey results from a large sample of economics departments describe offerings for principles courses, coursework requirements for economics majors, and program augmentations such as capstone courses, senior seminars, and honors programs. Findings are reported for all institutions, and institutions are subdivided into six different categories…

A lack of consensus remains on what should form the theoretical core of the undergraduate intermediate macroeconomic course. In determining how to deal with the Keynesian/classical divide, instructors must decide whether to follow the modern approach of building macroeconomic relationships from micro foundations, or to use the traditional approach…

In a typical economics principles course, students encounter a large number of concepts. In a literacy-targeted course, students study a "short list" of concepts that they can use for the rest of their lives. While a literacy-targeted principles course provides better education for nonmajors, it may place economic majors at a disadvantage in…

The second edition of the "Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics" was published by the Council for Economic Education in 2010. The authors examine the process for revising these precollege content standards and highlight several changes that appear in the new document. They also review the impact the standards have had on precollege…

Economics can be taught much earlier than we usually imagine, as a life skill, with direct experience, from kindergarten on. An experiential, early-grades economics of budgets, buying, and giving-up-to-get may be better than the politically inspired insistence that students get an allegedly healthy dose of free-market ideology just before they are…

Advanced Placement economics leaves thousands of high school students with a misleading impression of modern economics. The courses fail to cover key sources of growth and prosperity, including private ownership, dynamic competition, and entrepreneurship. The tools of public choice economics are totally ignored. Government is modeled as a…

The authors describe an interdisciplinary course team-taught by an economist and a sociologist. Historically mindful of the less than amicable relationship between these disciplines, these colleagues developed a course that attempted to illuminate the different perspectives of economics and sociology in relation to selected health themes. Such a…

Examines college students' choices of elective courses. Computes relative contributions to student satisfaction of six course and instructor attributes. Results suggest that choice is largely a function of perceived interest in course topic, applicability of course material to future career opportunities, and time of day course is offered.…

The typical profit-maximization solution for the joint-production problem found in intermediate texts, managerial texts, and other texts concerned with optimal pricing is oversimplified and inconsistent with profit maximization, unless there is either no excess of any of the joint products or no costs associated with dumping. However, it is an…

The author offers innovative approaches to 3 topics that are typically only briefly mentioned (if at all) in money and banking courses. The first topic is a Treasury bill auction experiment in which students have an opportunity to participate directly. The results from a class of 14 money and banking students are used to explain how an instructor…

The authors present a simplified, "stripped-down" version of poker as an instructional classroom game. Although Stripped-Down Poker is extremely simple, it nevertheless provides an excellent illustration of a number of topics: signaling, bluffing, mixed strategies, the value of information, and Bayes's Rule. The authors begin with a description of…

Several months after having completed an introductory economics course, most students are no better able to answer simple economic questions than students who never took the course. The problem seems to be that principles courses try to teach students far too much, with the result that everything goes by in a blur. The good news is that a…

Suggests a method to teach John Keynes's principle of effective demand using a standard aggregate labor market diagram familiar to students taking advanced undergraduate macroeconomics courses. States the analysis incorporates Michal Kalecki's version to show Keynesian unemployment as a point on the aggregate labor demand curve inside the…

Describes an introductory economics course in which all of the reading material is drawn from the Great Books of Western Civilization. Explains the rationale and mechanics of the course. Includes an annotated course syllabus that details how the reading material relates to the lecture material. (RLH)

Outlines principles that guide a successful undergraduate economics honors program: simplicity, accessibility, skill development, risk minimization, and incentives to combat procrastination. Describes a model which specifies three of the usual six electives and requires a senior thesis that makes an original contribution to economics…