I think you will find education research on teaching methodologies is exactly the problem that you have discovered. There are few attempts to create outcomes measures. You might want to look at:
"The Impact of the Internet on Economic Education," Journal of Economic
Education, Vol. 29(2), Spring 1998, pp. 99 - 110Dear tch-econers: Can someone point me to an example of a paper describing an active learning activity (a game, an experiment, a simulation, or the like) that actually reports a test of the activity's effectiveness on learning? Having read through the two dozen or so active learning papers in the past five years of the Journal of Economic Education, I found only one that compared student learning from that activity to student learning from a “standard” lecture/discussion with examples. It is true that most of the games and experiments described were game theoretic in nature, and the lessons from these games might obviously be more easily demonstrated than described. But even games on topics such as money demand, compensating differentials, and FOMC decisions did no more than assert that the games engaged students and sparked lively discussions (which I don’t doubt). Authors of these papers often claim that the activities improved student learning -- but where are the tests of active learning’s effectiveness in improving students’ test performance? For example, where is a paper that compares student test scores on a particular topic in a class that involved a game on that topic and in a class without a game? (I agree that such comparisons can be difficult to design and interpret.) I ask because two colleagues and I conducted such a comparison in our Macro Principles course this (just-concluded) semester, and we are looking for a context within which to place our results. Thanks for your help. Phil Holleran Department of Economics Radford University Box 6952 Radford, VA 24142 Office Phone: (540) 831-6778
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