Integrating discussion and digital media to increase classroom interaction
Section snippets
Literature review
In a special issue of the Southern Economic Journal in response to Becker’s Chronicle article, Hoyt (2003) suggested that if economics educators wanted to increase student engagement in their economics courses that they should focus on creating some type of “hook” to bring students into the material instead of adapting the material to the learner. One method of creating a learning hook is through the deliberate practice of selecting engaging examples that match the theory in order to reinforce
Pedagogical approach
There are two streams of pedagogy being combined to enhance active learning in the classroom. On their own, each provides benefits to the learning process, but their combination would ideally result in a multiplicative impact in order to justify their use. This research has not been tested in economics classrooms to date but has support from life science teaching fields and education pedagogy fields. Packaging videos with interactive questions may increase the relevant cognitive load and
Examples
Below are examples of clips of topics that can be used in a college-level principles of microeconomics course. The clips used below have been successful in getting students “hooked” with a topic and provide a sufficient amount of suspense to maintain a high level of engagement during lecture. All clips are currently (unbroken) on the Economics Media Library (Wooten, 2018). Appendix A shows a slide-by-slide handout of clips and response questions posed to students and the discussion below
Conclusion
Longer video clips have been shunned in recent pedagogy work because of the notion that the attention span of students is not conducive to longer videos with “boring” economics topics. To echo Hoyt’s (2003) criticism that the material need not be changed to adapt to the learner, video clips need not be selected to appease the assumed deficit in attention. Longer video clips, which contain detailed story lines and can connect many topics together, can be adapted to the audience rather than
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