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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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Requiring Students to Apply Key Concepts in Writing
By Frank Giarratani, Economics There are certain key concepts or “principles” of economics that appear as recurring themes in the Introduction to Microeconomic Theory course I have taught for 30 years or so, and I reinforce these concepts by requiring students to write essays focused on application. The widely used textbook that I adopt for the course devotes the first chapter to listing and explaining ten principles, each of which goes to the heart of economic reasoning. However, it is still easy for students to lose site of these concepts, and students may not tie particular topics in the textbook to the principles as they are revealed later in the text. I want my students to appreciate the richness of the principles and believe that this can be accomplished by revisiting the concepts involved as the students gain more knowledge about the subject matter. As a result of my work on revising the course with a CIDDE instructional designer, I began to assign essays based on applications of the principles over the course of the term. Students are assigned three essays, which taken together account for 10 percent of their course grade. In each essay, students are asked to explain one principle and tie that principle to one application from the textbook and one application from an item in the daily news. For the news item, students can draw from any major newspaper. Students are provided in advance with a suggested outline for the essay, but they are not strictly required to use the format offered in the outline. In addition, students are provided with a set of 10 criteria upon which their essays will be graded. I have found that this method of requiring students to engage with the principles in writing causes them to remain alert to the principles as they are introduced to key theoretical ideas in economics.
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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for Instructional Development & Distance Education |
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