Verbal and graphical strategies in the teaching of economics

Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that teaching concepts in high school economics first in a familiar mode or symbol system and then elaborating on them in a second or less familiar mode facilitates classroom learning. In an experimental design, 83 high school seniors were individually assigned at random to three classes, which in turn were randomly assigned to three different classroom instructional treatments, each having a duration of 10 hours and taught by the students' regular economics teachers. It was predicted and found that comprehension of economics is facilitated by a teaching strategy that initially presents the concepts in a familiar verbal mode and then presents them in a more abstract mode using graphs or other instructive imagery. This strategy compared favorably with two alternative procedures, one presenting the same content first in graphs and then verbally ( p<0.001), and the other using only one mode of presentation ( p<0.01). These results imply that the type and order of presentation of symbol systems influence the learning of concepts in high school economics classes by facilitating or interfering with the generation of relations between prior knowledge and new information. The results imply that presenting economics concepts in two symbol systems, rather than one, facilitates learning, provided, contrary to customary teaching methods, that the teacher uses the familiar verbal presentation first and follows it with an integrative but less familiar graphic presentation.