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Category: Teaching

Published August 28, 2012

How Can I Do Well in My Econ Course?

“I have studied a lot for this test, but I didn’t do well. How can I do better next time?”

This is a question I hear a lot. Because I teach the core undergraduate microeconomics course in a public policy school, where not all students like economics, it is a question I probably hear more often than my colleagues who teach microeconomics in an economics department.

Instead of saying the same thing over and over again to different students, I thought I should write down my thoughts about how one can maximize the chances one will do well in one’s core economics classes (e.g., micro, macro, or econometrics). You can download my handout on the topic here: How to (Maximize the Likelihood That You Will) Do Well in Your Economics Class.

Published August 23, 2012

How Can I Gain a Quick Understanding of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences?

If you teach in a policy school or in a political science department, chances are some of your students are not quite conversant in the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.

Many of the students who sign up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy, for example, are incredibly bright, but they are not familiar with regression analysis, and so they don’t know how to read a regression table. This makes it difficult to assign empirical papers in World Development for in-class discussion, let alone papers in the Journal of Development Economics.

While I do not have the time to teach basic econometrics to students in those seminars, I have prepared two handouts for them to read in preparation for reading papers containing empirical results, which I thought I should make available to anyone who would rather not spend precious class time teaching the basics of quantitative methods. I have used both these handouts in my development seminar last fall, and my students said that they had learned quite a bit from reading them.

Given that many of us are spending these days revising our syllabus for the fall semester, I have revised my empirical handouts for the new academic year, and I am happy to make them available to whoever wants to use them. If you use them, I simply request that you do not modify them and that you let me know about how I can improve them for next year.

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