Creativity in the Classroom

Creativity in the Classroom

While some disciplines encourage substantial creativity in their undergraduate students, the vast majority of college student academic effort goes into analysis or memorization. Certainly that’s true in economics. Most of the students in my seminars are seniors, and they are far more comfortable interpreting and using theory than creating or even tweaking it.

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Economics and Data Analysis

Economics and Data Analysis

We live in a world where more and more people and organizations make decisions based on data. These include business decisions, policy-making decisions, and even many personal decisions. Google employs hundreds of quantitative analysts to analyze auctions, forecast revenue, predict customer needs, and surely lots of other things we don’t know about. A good friend of mine just spent the last month carefully analyzing student loan data for the Federal Reserve. I even just read about a guy who scraped dating data from OK Cupid to find himself a wife.

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Don't Throw Them to the Wolves

Don't Throw Them to the Wolves

I recently heard Michael Koelle (Associate Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale) give a very interesting presentation on teaching. He led by saying he wasn’t going to talk about anything trendy like MOOC’s or flipping the classroom or project-based learning, but would instead focus on how how he teaches traditional big lecture courses. He proceeded to tell us about the most progressive lecture courses I’ve ever heard of. Among other things, he never lectures for more than 15 minutes at a time and peppers his classes with interactivity and small group exercises. While his whole talk was inspiring and full of concrete advice and ideas, I want to write today about something he brought up almost in passing.

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Online tech in an in-person seminar: An experiment with Piazza

Online tech in an in-person seminar: An experiment with Piazza

I’ve written about how I like to run seminar classes before and you may have noticed that my approach is decidedly low tech. My students read the week’s articles before class and fill out a “worksheet” for each one. Before this semester, the most important question on the worksheet was “What didn’t you understand?” I would look over their answers to identify weak spots that we would cover in class.

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A Few Thoughts on Grade Inflation

A Few Thoughts on Grade Inflation

Grade inflation at Yale is a sensitive topic–The administration doesn’t even like to call the issue grade inflation but instead refers to the problem as grade compression. The feeling is not that grades are (necessarily) too high, but that with so many A’s and A-‘a being handed out, it’s very hard to distinguish the good students and the great students. Is this really true? And is grade inflation itself a real problem? And if there is a problem with grade distributions, how should we fix it? I don’t have answers, but I do have opinions.

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Exams and Online Classes

Exams and Online Classes

With just a few exceptions, no one likes exams. Students don’t like the stress of taking the exams, instructors have to write the exams, and someone usually has to grade them. In-class exams don’t give enough time for testing very much material, and if the test is too long, it punishes students who know their stuff but are just a little slow. Take-home exams can cover more content, but it can be very tempting for students to cheat by getting help from friends or the Internet. Unfortunately, we need objective assessments of how much each student has mastered the course material, and right now exams are the best tool we have.

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The Opposite of a MOOC

The Opposite of a MOOC

MOOC’s are Massive Open Online Courses and they are what everyone in higher education is talking about. These classes are usually free, have huge enrollments, and per student are pretty cheap to run relative to a typical college class. The quality can be decent and MOOC’s open up access to higher education to literally billions of people around the world. MOOC’s also have the potential to decrease the cost of education for the millions of people that would normally attend a traditional in person college.

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