TEACHING TOOLS - HOW IS INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS TAUGHT IN AMERICA

We describe the faculty, students, teaching methods, and assessment in struments used in 180 introductory economics classes taught by 122 dif ferent instructors at 53 different colleges and universities. Despite variation in class size and types of institution, both introductory ma croeconomics and introductory microeconomics are taught predominantly as lecture courses, with the largest part of students' course grades d etermined by performance on multiple-choice question tests. There seem s to be little experimentation with alternative pedagogies or assessme nt techniques despite an increasing amount of attention to these issue s in recent years.