Promoting Experimental Economics in the Classroom

Economic experiments allow the K-12 teacher to promote active learning that is also rigorously grounded in economic theory. In an experiment students test for themselves the economics they hear in lectures and read in their textbooks. The authors have found that working through the existing teacher professional development system is a promising approach to infusing experimental methods into the school curriculum. This paper describes a short professional development course in experimental economics. The experience of conducting the course with two groups of teachers is discussed and survey results pertaining to teacher implementation of classroom experiments are presented