Social media is one of the most current and dynamic developments in education. In general, the field of economics has lagged behind other disciplines in incorporating technologies in the classroom. In this article, the authors provide a guide for economics educators on how to incorporate Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook inside and outside of the…

Economics faculty expect that students have an integrated understanding of economic theory upon graduation and that they grasp and appreciate how all elements of markets naturally move to equilibrium. Through assessment activities, the authors discovered that their students were not developing that knowledge, so they turned to learning theory to…

Concerns about consumers' ability to manage their finances have triggered a range of proposals, including interventions aimed at elementary school students. The goal of these approaches is to improve lifelong economic decision making, but the evidence supporting their efficacy is thin. In this article, the authors discuss the trend toward…

One associate editor's perspective on classroom experiment articles is detailed in this article. The associate editor provides recommendations for manuscripts for the Instruction (those that describe new classroom experiments) and Research (those reporting studies into the efficacy of classroom experiments as a pedagogical tool) Sections of…

Economics appears to be lagging behind other fields in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. Twitter is an online microblogging utility, permitting posts of up to 140 characters called tweets. The utility is rapidly making its way into secondary and post-secondary classrooms as a complement to traditional instruction and an active…

Several leading undergraduate intermediate macroeconomics textbooks now include a simple reduced-form New Keynesian model of short-run dynamics (alongside the IS-LM model). Unfortunately, there is no accompanying description of how the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates affects the model. In this article, the authors show how the…

The "National Standards for Financial Literacy" describe the knowledge, understanding, and skills that are important for students to learn about personal finance. They are designed to guide teachers, school administrators, and other educators in developing curriculum and educational materials for teaching financial literacy. In this…

Although the concept of the sampling distribution is at the core of much of what we do in econometrics, it is a concept that is often difficult for students to grasp. The thought process behind bootstrapping provides a way for students to conceptualize the sampling distribution in a way that is intuitive and visual. However, teaching students to…

In this article, the author explains why field experiments can improve what we teach and how we teach economics. Economists no longer operate as passive observers of economic phenomena. Instead, they participate actively in the research process by collecting data from field experiments to investigate the economics of everyday life. This change can…

Adverse selection as it relates to health care policy will be a key economic issue in many upcoming elections. In this article, the author lays out a 30-minute classroom experiment designed for students to experience the kind of elevated prices and market collapse that can result from adverse selection in health insurance markets. The students…

Individuals vary in their responses to incentives and opportunities. For example, additional education will affect one person differently than another. In recent years, econometricians have given increased attention to such heterogeneous responses and to the consequences of such responses for interpreting regression estimates, especially…

Adam Smith's moral philosophy can be used to introduce economics students to the important idea of transactions costs. The author provides a brief background in this article to Smith's moral philosophy and connects it to the costs of transacting in a way that fits easily into the standard principles of microeconomics classroom. By doing…

In this article, the author describes conceptually how to think about the dramatic changes in monetary policy since the sub-prime crisis of August 2007. He also discusses how to incorporate these changes and related economic concepts in the teaching of an undergraduate class in macroeconomics. A distinction is made between conventional and…

The standard workhorse models of monetary policy now commonly in use, both for teaching macro-economics to students and for supporting policymaking within many central banks, are incapable of incorporating the most widely accepted accounts of how the 2007-9 financial crisis occurred and are incapable too of analyzing the actions that monetary…

Economic educators often profess the goal of teaching our students to "think like economists." Since Siegfried and colleagues (1991) coined this phrase, its meaning has been interpreted as a focus on analytical concepts and methods of economics as opposed to the broader goal of preparing students for independent, critical thought in the…