Audience Response Systems And Classroom Economics Experiments
As a DMC Faculty Fellow, Professor Donald Liu of the Department of Applied Economics sought to address a recurring problem he encountered in his introductory economics courses, namely how to make the abstract concepts of economics more concrete and thus more comprehensible for undergraduates. His general idea was to reenact the economic situation through classroom “experiments” in which economic principles are manifested in students’ own trading behavior.
Conducting such experiments, however, imposes large costs on instructors who must coordinate and manage large amounts of student-generated data in real time. Dr. Liu found a solution in the audience response system (ARS, or clickers), which enabled him to significantly reduce these costs as well as to minimize the time lag between the trading experiment itself and student reflection on the data.
Results
DMC consultants and researchers worked with Dr. Liu to integrate the ARS system into his economic experiments and to conduct quasi-experimental research on the effects of this integration on student learning. More information on this project is available at http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/transform/archive/TransformV2N2.pdf.
