Final retrospective
For this final prompt, I do have quite a bit to say. It has been bugging me that a course that was clearly put together with such a great deal of effort is so unsuccessful at making students come to class, let alone keeping the pupils engaged. I have no insight into how this semester's section was different from the prior offerings of the class, making it harder for me to dismiss the hypotheses derived from this single data point. Before diving into the criticism, let me state that I did learn a lot from this course and admit that I am personally responsible for what I didn't learn.
To pinpoint the issue with this class, let me compare it to 400-level math courses, which I have taken the most of. The difference was not in optional attendance or in rolling submissions, despite what one might think; instead, what does immediately stand out in comparison is how much time is being spent covering the material versus class logistics. When it comes to math courses, I would be shocked if I was told logistics ever take up more than 2% of the professor's lecturing time. In this course, however, I had a feeling that we oftentimes spent over half the section time talking about the class itself instead of the material. In general, we didn't spend that much time actually learning.
How could that be, one might ask, if the course employed the Socratic Dialogue method and covered quite a bit of content? Frankly, I'm not sure. Perhaps an evident systematic problem reinforced itself over the semester making the class spiral out of control: many questions asked during the "Dialogues" were so obvious they could as well be rhetoric, making the students' forced answers feel awkward and stupid—the very appearances people are most afraid of. The feeling of stupidity or awkwardness combined with little time being spent discussing the actual material disincentivized attendance, which in turn only developed the notion that students need to be asked even simpler questions and even more time has to be spent discussing logistics.
I wish we talked more about the mathematical models that the sublime spreadsheet homeworks taught us (I had never seen spreadsheets like these and will not forget their high quality in many years; it truly is a shame we have barely covered them in class, making their teaching effectiveness marginal). I wish the questions asked in class were more open-ended and provocative. I wish I personally put more work into writing better, because writing is a skill and remains even in this day and age the best way to amplify your ideas.
Now to the good parts. The writing part of the course was simply great: it is useful and interesting, and the prompts generally give you both a well-defined direction and some space for interpretation. Writing might not have been easy, nor was I ever motivated to do it on-demand, but it was good for me as a student. The concepts and the more advanced economic theory presented in the course were fascinating too: I was exposed to some new ideas and now know where to go if I ever feel inclined to learn more. Most importantly, this class and some other life events of this semester got me into the habit of reading scientific papers. Learning about allocative vs productive efficiency vs economic equilibrium, risk aversion, Shapiro-Stiglitz, Akerlof's Market for Lemons, Nash's Bargaining Problem, ergodicity (not sure if all of this is from this class) was great.
On a final note, Pr. Arvan, if you don't mind, please do reference some economic papers that you find most important and interesting. I might not be able to take any more advanced economics courses in my undergraduate career and will greatly appreciate your recommendations.
To pinpoint the issue with this class, let me compare it to 400-level math courses, which I have taken the most of. The difference was not in optional attendance or in rolling submissions, despite what one might think; instead, what does immediately stand out in comparison is how much time is being spent covering the material versus class logistics. When it comes to math courses, I would be shocked if I was told logistics ever take up more than 2% of the professor's lecturing time. In this course, however, I had a feeling that we oftentimes spent over half the section time talking about the class itself instead of the material. In general, we didn't spend that much time actually learning.
How could that be, one might ask, if the course employed the Socratic Dialogue method and covered quite a bit of content? Frankly, I'm not sure. Perhaps an evident systematic problem reinforced itself over the semester making the class spiral out of control: many questions asked during the "Dialogues" were so obvious they could as well be rhetoric, making the students' forced answers feel awkward and stupid—the very appearances people are most afraid of. The feeling of stupidity or awkwardness combined with little time being spent discussing the actual material disincentivized attendance, which in turn only developed the notion that students need to be asked even simpler questions and even more time has to be spent discussing logistics.
I wish we talked more about the mathematical models that the sublime spreadsheet homeworks taught us (I had never seen spreadsheets like these and will not forget their high quality in many years; it truly is a shame we have barely covered them in class, making their teaching effectiveness marginal). I wish the questions asked in class were more open-ended and provocative. I wish I personally put more work into writing better, because writing is a skill and remains even in this day and age the best way to amplify your ideas.
Now to the good parts. The writing part of the course was simply great: it is useful and interesting, and the prompts generally give you both a well-defined direction and some space for interpretation. Writing might not have been easy, nor was I ever motivated to do it on-demand, but it was good for me as a student. The concepts and the more advanced economic theory presented in the course were fascinating too: I was exposed to some new ideas and now know where to go if I ever feel inclined to learn more. Most importantly, this class and some other life events of this semester got me into the habit of reading scientific papers. Learning about allocative vs productive efficiency vs economic equilibrium, risk aversion, Shapiro-Stiglitz, Akerlof's Market for Lemons, Nash's Bargaining Problem, ergodicity (not sure if all of this is from this class) was great.
On a final note, Pr. Arvan, if you don't mind, please do reference some economic papers that you find most important and interesting. I might not be able to take any more advanced economics courses in my undergraduate career and will greatly appreciate your recommendations.
Our class is heterogenous in student interest and math preparation. In years past, when I was doing economics full time, I would do two hours of lecture on the math models and got to enjoy that very much. But that was a different era to a different audience. I wonder if you did watch the video on the Shapiro-Stiglitz model, which does what you asked for in this particular case. Most students in our class did not watch it much, if it all. Last time the class was offered, in one class session I went to the blackboard (I prefer chalk to those markers they use in our classroom) and did about a fifteen minute derivation. A student came up to me after class and said don't do that again. So there is the dilemma for a course like this.
ReplyDeleteSince you liked the Excel homework, if you are interested after the course is over I can give you an unprotected version of the homework, so by right clicking on cells (and on the graphs), you can reverse engineer how it is done - on the Excel side of things. There is then the question of what should be presented and what questions to ask. I think that is more art than science. The reality here is that most students would "learn" these models if they were drilled in them, meaning repetition of the models. This is not the way I think about learning things, but it is what I'm getting in the posts from some other students. I simply didn't have the energy to write the Excel with drill in it.
On a different but related note, when I first started to construct these, I had an idea that students would make such homework aimed at high school math and science classes. Teachers are overwhelmed with the large number of students they have and can't give enough interesting homework. So this would be a way to do something constructive and potentially benefit many. Plus, Excel is a pretty common application so there would be no incremental cost, as there would be with an application like MatLab or Mathematica.
On the references - I wonder if you've read all the papers mentioned in the course - starting with Herbert Simon's Nobel Lecture, Paul David's paper on QWERTY, and Spence's paper on Job Market Signaling. Then I did mention Debreu's Theory of Value, which is the elegant treatment of general equilibrium theory. If only the world behaved like the model, that would be the model to study. And there is Coase's original paper on The Nature of the Firm.
There is a Handbook of Organizational Economics, which you can access through JSTOR if you are on the campus network. It has more advanced and more current papers in the area. I will close with 2 papers that I wrote, not that you should focus on them, but you might track down the references. In the 1980s I was interested in oligopoly models and these papers are that area. The first is called Some Examples of Dynamic Cournot Duopoly with Inventory. The underlying idea is that sunk costs, in the term of prior inventory investment, serve as a commitment device to how the duopoly will play out in the future. The result is that the outcome can be asymmetric even when the initial conditions are symmetric. That was a new result at the time. The second paper is called Symmetric Equilibrium with Random Entry. It has no sunk costs, so is like the model of perfect competition in the long run. But the conclusion is quite different, which suggests there are some hidden additional assumptions in the perfect competition model that are usually not discussed.
The said heterogeneity alerted me when taking lower-level econ classes, but I expected the math ability of students to even out once I get to 400-level classes. I guess it doesn't. Do you think there is something that can be done with regards to how the coursework or the whole econ degree in this department is structured? Is this a real problem that the department is overlooking?
DeletePlease do send the unlocked homeworks. I hope I'll have time to learn more from them.
No, I definitely have not read all the papers but I aspire to do so. Having them listed in one place such as this comment of yours helps.