THE TEACHING ECONOMIST - William A. McEachern 
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Issue 21, Fall 2001
William A. McEachern, Editor
Grapevine
Matthew Rabin of UC Berkeley is the first John Bates Clark medal winner to openly embrace behavioral economics, an approach that incorporates elements of psychology into standard economic theory. Last year Rabin won a McArthur Foundation award, which comes with a $500,000 grant. His research has focused on the perception of fairness in markets, particularly labor markets. He is also interested in procrastination, though he hasn't yet gotten around to writing up those findings. Not true. In "Choice and Procrastination," Rabin and Ted O'Donahue argue that people procrastinate more in pursuing important goals than unimportant ones and that offering a non-procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination. PDF copies of his papers can be found at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/users/rabin. There you can also check out pictures of Rabin on what he calls "a good-hair day" and on "a bad-hair day." It's worth a click. A few years ago he compiled "An Incomplete List of (about 2000) Psychology and Economic Citations," which can be found at http://www.mit.edu/people/irons/rsage/rabib.html.
Robert Solow has been famously quoted as observing that we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics. A variant of that might be that we read about hi-tech teaching methods everywhere but seldom see them in the classroom. According to the latest survey by William Becker of Indiana University and Michael Watts of Purdue University, most undergraduate instructors in 2000 lectured, used the chalkboard, and assigned readings from a standard textbook. This picture is essentially unchanged from their 1995 survey. The median amount of time devoted to lecturing in all courses at all institutions was 83%. Textbooks were also used 83%of the time for assignments in all types of courses at all types of institutions. Overhead projectors were used 11 to 33% of the time in principles classes at research universities and two-year colleges, but were rarely used elsewhere. Except in statistics and econometrics courses, computer-generated displays were seldom used at any type of school. Becker and Watts summarize their findings in "Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk," American Economic Review, 90 (May 2001): 446-451.
How effective are newer teaching methods? David Hoaas of Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, sent me a copy of a paper in which he and colleague Elizabeth Rankin examine the impact of using PowerPoint slides on student performance, student attitudes toward economics, and student evaluations. The same instructor taught two one-semester introductory economics courses for two semesters. Each semester, one 35-person section was taught using an animated slide presentation generated by PowerPoint and the other 35-person section, serving as the control group, was taught using chalk and talk exclusively. So as not to introduce a self-selection bias, students had no prior information about the manner of instruction before they enrolled and were not allowed to switch classes. PowerPoint slides were developed by the instructor and reflected the notes used in the control group. To help explain graphs, the instructor supplemented PowerPoint with the chalkboard. The same textbook and same exams were used in each course. Exams were a mix of multiple choice and essay questions..
The bottom line is that, after accounting for a variety of other explanatory variables, using PowerPoint, with one exception, had no significant effect on student grades, student attitudes, or student evaluations of the instructor. The one significant difference was that, among those in the chalk-and-talk sections, significantly more students at the end of the semester said they "would be willing to attend a lecture by an economist" than had so indicated at the beginning of the semester. So the one significant finding seems to favor chalk and talk. Hoaas and Rankin speculate that PowerPoint might actually lower student performance to the extent that students believe material not presented on slides is not important enough, so they take notes only from the slides. And after students have copied the relevant material from the slides, they may turn off on the rest and be more bored since they do not feel they need to listen as attentively.
Incidentally, the PowerPoint class was offered at 8:20 a.m. and the chalk-and-talk class at 9:45 a.m. in the spring semester. So as not to introduce a time-of-day bias, class times were reversed the fall semester. In the student grade equation, a dummy variable for time of day suggested lower grades for the 8:20 class, though the difference was not significant. The Hoaas and Rankin paper, "Does the Use of Computer-Generated Slide Presentations in the Classroom Affect Student Performance and Interest?" was just published in the Eastern Economic Journal, 27 (Summer 2001): 355-366.
I haven't used PowerPoint, but I have briefly tried overhead transparencies. I found that the atmosphere changed when the first one went up. It's as if students went into a trance. A colleague who tried PowerPoint said his midterm grades were terrible, so he stopped. He thought it was because students didn't get a chance to see him drawing diagrams, so they couldn't figure out how to draw them.
The previous issue of "The Grapevine" published "Building an Economic Utopia: A Capstone Activity," by Richard Schiming of Minnesota State University, Mankato. He has a Web page that lists the specific activities for constructing a utopia. The site also includes his grading criteria. The address is http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~schimr/web/utopia.html.
Allen Prindle of Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, says he has begun referring to graphs as cartoons. Cartoons tell stories, serve as symbols or simplifications, and often "teach" a lesson. He notes that some students are afraid of graphs, but they relate more easily to cartoons.