Teaching Development & Efforts to Improve Student Learning
Journal
Each semester for my most regular courses, ECO110 and ECO336, I keep a journal about the effectiveness of the readings, activities, and discussions. Essentially, it is a diary of what works and what does not, what questions spurred good discussions and what questions left the students flat. I use this journal to adjust exam questions as well as problem sets that either I have developed or borrowed from the textbook. This enables me to keep track of questions that are confusing or did not generate the depth of thinking I had intended.
The Creation of Student Debates
During the fall semester of 2005 I introduced student debates into the class. The debate structure worked best with certain topics, such as affirmative action, and forced students to create a logical argument for presentation to the class as opposed to simply covering the reading. In order to prepare for the debate, students were required to access many sources and not only create their own argument, but to anticipate their opponent’s argument.
Pertinent Outside of Class Activities
Fall 2003: Barbara Ehrenreich came to speak at UW-L after we had read her book Nickled and Dimed.
Fall 2005: the class went to see the movie North Country about the first sexual harassment class action suit.
Informal Writing Sheets Within the Student Readings Packet
In order to encourage students to do informal writing, I created a “reading worksheet” that had specific questions about each week’s reading. This was printed out along with their readings packet and one worksheet was created for each week’s reading list. What I did not do that I plan to do in the future, is to collect these periodically in order to encourage more entries. See Appendix G for an example of the Reading Worksheet that was developed.
Smaller “packet” Assignments Given Prior to When Main Paper is Due
One of the more difficult aspects of the Formal Writing Assignments is the portion where the students need to use the local data to actually test the economic theory presented. For example, in FWA3, students are analyzing the division of labor in the household. Using the local data, they can show that on average, women do more hours of household labor than men, even if they work full-time in the labor market. One of the economic theories that explains this phenomenon is the Neoclassical Model of Specialization and Exchange. Once they have shown evidence of the issue, and chosen a theory to attempt to explain the issue, they are then required to see if the model bears out with the data. Two possible ways to show this is to examine where men and women have comparative advantages and to see if in those situations couples tend to be more divided in terms of household and market work. This may occur, for example, in cases where (among dual income households) men earn more than women or, if the couple has very young (pre-school aged) children. These examples are based on the theory. What students are unable to do is conceive of a test that would, perhaps, show that the theory does not work. For example, if you were to examine the data and find cases where a wife earns more money than her husband and then examine the amount of housework done. According to the theory, all other things constant, the husband should do more housework.
In order to encourage students to really think through the problem, I intend to break down the assignment into smaller “packets”. Instead of having them attempt the entire argument of the paper, I intend to create smaller assignments where they first conceive of tests of the theories and then implement the tests prior to writing the paper. Often the writing portion of the paper is difficult enough and seems to eclipse the testing portion of that assignment.
One Particular Problem Identified and a Possible Solution
One of the problems that I identified with ECO336 is that the students simply did not believe the material that I was presenting. Regardless of the quality or quantity of information presented to them, they could not comprehend that a wage gap between men and women continues to exist in 2005, nor that women worked in different occupations than men on average, that women continue to do the majority of domestic labor in the household or that women (and their children) comprise the majority of the population in poverty.
During the fall of 2002, I introduced a method to inspire active learning in my ECO336 classroom through gathering and examining primary data. I required students to survey couples and then use the data to explore relevant issues to our class discussions, including the wage gap between men and women as well as the division of labor in the household (see attached survey that I developed for previous research based on the 1983 Blumstein and Schwartz couples’ survey Appendix F). Not only did they learn the ideas presented in the classroom, but they also got a taste of the difficulties associated with survey data, while learning basic basic SPSS skills.
Other Teaching Development Activities Related to ECO336
○Attended OPID Teaching Conference, Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Integrating Scholarly Inquiry into Campus and System Culture, held in Madison, WI, April 13th and 14th, 2004.
○Participated in an informal discussion group organized through the College of Liberal Studies on Teaching for Diversity (spring 2003).
○Attended Faculty College, June 3-6, 2002 Richland Center.
○Attended the seventh annual International Association for Feminist Economists (IAFFE) teaching workshop “Assessment and Evaluation Techniques and Strategies Workshop”. Thursday, January 3, 2002 in Atlanta Georgia.
○Presented “Using Primary Data in the Classroom” at the 5th Annual UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning, January 2004.
○Presented “Group Evaluations” at the 4th Annual UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning, January 2003.