Teaching Undergraduate Economics: A Handbook for Instructors.

• Author: Case, Karl E.
• Position: Review

By William Walstad and Phillip Saunders. Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998. Pp. x, 368. $34.00.

This is an excellent set of 22 essays that should be required reading for all economics instructors. It is by and large well written, and it comes in bite-sized chunks for easy bedside reading. It covers virtually every aspect of teaching with a focus on the principles course.

Most of the book is not new. About half of it has been written and revised by the authors over the past 20 years. I first encountered several of the essays in 1979 when I served on the American Economic Association's (AEA) Committee on Economic Education, and I used them extensively as a staff member at five AEA teacher-training programs between 1981 and 1983. At the time, they formed the basis of what was called the Resource Manual for Teacher Training Programs in Economics, which was distributed to graduate students and faculty members who were participants in those programs. I still have my copy today and I am delighted that they will now get wider circulation.

Most of the authors (there are 26 of them) have been working together to improve the quality of economic education for over 20 years. I worked with 10 of them on those teacher-training programs over 15 years ago.

The best chapters in the book are the ones that have been around for the longest time. I suppose they have been critiqued and revised the most. My favorite is Phil Saunders' essay on "Learning Theory and Instructional Objectives." It contains in capsule form an entire course on the modem schools of thought on how students learn. It covers in a clear and understandable way what we do and do not know about learning, and it treats the various paradigms with an even hand. I found myself saying "of course" several times. Certainly taking the time to read this little chapter beats a year at "ed school."

My second favorite chapter is written by Lee Hansen and Mike Salemi on "Improving Classroom Discussion." Here the authors steal a page from the Great Books Foundation's materials distributed to participants in Great Books discussion groups. I was a reasonably good lecturer coming out of graduate school, but I couldn't get my students to talk. I asked rhetorical questions and got little response. Ever since I read this essay, I have used the kinds of question clusters that are proposed with great success.

One of the great lessons of the teacher-training experience for me, and I believe for most of the...