TEACHING TOOLS: HOW IS INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS TAUGHT IN AMERICA?

Abstract

We describe the faculty, students, teaching methods, and assessment instruments used in 180 introductory economics classes taught by 122 different instructors at 53 different colleges and universities. Despite variation in class size and types of institution, both introductory macroeconomics and introductory microeconomics are taught predominantly as lecture courses, with the largest part of students' course grades determined by performance on multiple‐choice question tests. There seems to be little experimentation with alternative pedagogies or assessment techniques despite an in‐creasing amount of attention to these issues in recent years.