This paper examines the question of how an instructor's attendance policy influences student performance in Principles of Microeconomics. This study asked students in several different microeconomics classes at a medium sized regional university what sort of attendance policy they were subject...

I present a classroom experiment designed to help students learn (1) decision-making using marginal analysis; (2) the prediction of the price; (3) the decentralized determination of a price by the market; (4) specialization; (5) the gains from trade; and (6) the ability of a competitive market to...

We provide 11 short exercises that can be used in a principles of microeconomics classroom which incorporate media clips from the Economics Media Library. The exercises have been used in both small and large classroom settings and take less than 15 minutes to complete. These teaching guides can...

This paper presents an in-class experiment used as a teaching tool in an introductory microeconomics class at the undergraduate college level. It is directed at a critical but challenging concept for principles students — constrained utility maximization and a methodology to intuit...

Classroom experiments as a teaching tool increase understanding and especially motivation. Traditionally, experiments have been run using pen-and-paper or in a computer lab. Pen-and-paper is time and resource consuming. Experiments in the lab require appropriate installations and impede the...

This paper analyzes to what degree 25 undergraduate microeconomics textbooks incorporate contributions from behavioral economics and experimental economics. We find that ten of the 25 textbooks examined make no reference at all to behavioral economics; six dedicate less than 1% of total pages to...

The "Lake Wobegon Effect'' describes the potential bias introduced into survey-based analyses of education issues, because students systematically over-report academic achievements such as grade-point average. While the use of official-records data negates this effect, many researchers can only...

The purpose of this study is to examine a controversial debate whether students who spend more time on completing the assignments perform better. More specifically, the study investigates the relationship between the time spent (as a measure of students' efforts) on an assignment and students'...

Is it possible to teach mainstream microeconomic principles which prepare students for upper division economics courses while also exposing them to the well known heterodox dissent of Veblen, Galbraith, Boulding, Myrdal, Schumacher, and others? This article offers a method for presenting in a...