Issue 34, Spring 2008

William A. McEachern, Editor

The Grapevine

Conventional wisdom has long held that students can learn how to solve computational problems by following the template of worked-out problems. Some textbooks even include worked-out problems in the body of the text. But a special issue of Learning and Instruction (Vol. 16, April 2006) has published several studies that cast doubt on the effectiveness of worked-out problems, at least as a general approach. In that issue, Roxana Moreno of the University of New Mexico offers commentary on these findings. Here are some possible reasons why students have difficulty applying solutions from worked-out examples to new problems. Students often suffer from what's been called an ''illusion of understanding.'' They think they know more than they do. Also, some students apparently can't identify key information in the examples and instead focus on irrelevant features. Moreno's commentary, "When Worked Examples Don't Work: Is Cognitive Load Theory at an Impasse?" can be found at http://www.iapsych.com/articles/moreno2006.pdf.

Edward Castronova of Indiana University used a $240,000 MacArthur Foundation grant to develop an educational game called Arden: The World of William Shakespeare. According to Professor Castronova, the game has only one problem: "It's no fun." He says that unless a game has puzzles and monsters, people don't want to play it. With a successful game like World of Warcraft costing about $75 million to develop, he says he bit off more than he could chew. Although his original intent was to test economic theories by manipulating the rules of the game, he gave up on that idea. His game can be found at http://swi.indiana.edu/arden/index.shtml.

In his best-selling memoir, The Age of Turbulence (Penguin Press, 2007), Alan Greenspan singled out David J. Stockton, head researcher at the Fed since 2000. "He never sought nor received the press that Fed governors get, but when the governors gave speeches, it was his forecast of the U.S. economy that Fed watchers were getting. We governors learned to see him as the indispensable, behind-the-scenes staffer"(p. 250). I'll speculate that if someone were to develop an influence-to-visibility ratio for economists, this relatively unknown researcher would rank among tops in the world. (But I'm probably biased: David was my undergraduate advisee and student at the University of Connecticut.)

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