Enhancing the teaching of introductory economics with a team-based, multi-section competition (original) (raw)

2017, The Journal of Economic Education

The authors describe a unique approach to enhancing student learning at the introductory economics level that utilizes a multi-section, team-based competition. The competition is structured to supplement learning throughout the entire introductory course. Student teams are presented with current economic issues, trends, or events, and use economic tools and theories to comprehensively examine the topics. Students present their analyses in their own sections with one team from each section moving on to compete in an intersection round. Students are judged on technicality, creativity, and applicability of economic concepts. The competition has the potential to advance students' creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical and analytical thinking skills, while enhancing their ability to apply foundational economic concepts to real-world settings. The development of our millennial students has been shaped by rapidly changing technological, entertainment, economic, and political arenas. Therefore, scholars of teaching and learning suggest that millennials thrive in active learning environments in which content is kept relevant, dynamic, and learned through competitive group projects (Prensky 2001). To meet the needs of our current students, we have developed a team-based, multi-section competition that envelopes the content of an entire semester of introductory economics and gives students an interactive way to explore the applicability of their economic knowledge. At the beginning of each semester, students are placed into teams and presented with a current economic event, trend, or issue. Student teams work throughout the semester, draw together economic concepts to comprehensively understand the issue, and suggest timely and feasible solutions during an 8-minute class presentation within their own sections. One team from each section advances to an intersection round and competes against teams from other sections. At each level of the competition, teams are judged on technicality, creativity, and applicability of economic concepts. Those who advance to the intersection round have an opportunity to win cash prizes. Unlike the discontinuous group projects scattered throughout, or placed at the end of the semester, semester-long experiments (Valcarcel 2013), writing assignments (Strasser and Wolfe 2014), and competitions (Singh and Russo 2013; Aguilar and Soques 2015; Gulley and Jackson 2015) have shown to greatly improve the learning outcomes of our current students as they tend to have a better understanding of the concepts, and ability to creatively and critically analyze real problems with the use of economic tools and theories. The teamwork and multi-section design of our competition provide additional dimensions to ensure that it has enough dynamic components to keep our students invested and interested in the course content throughout the entire semester.