Gary King Advanced Quantitative Research Methodology

Gary King becomes one of the number of scholars making high-quality courses taught in the top universities available online. The website for his Advanced Quantitative Research methodology course is available here.

How should Economics Instruction change

A fascinating set of articles (via Marginal Revolution) all three or four paragraphs in length about how people like Cowen, Laibson, Alesina and others see economics teaching changing as a result of the crisis. Focused on macro.

Simon Halliday - Using Technology in Education

Via Stephen Kinsella's blog, this presentation by Simon Halliday on the use of technology in teaching economics is well worth a watch. One link I got from it was to a website on using music to teach economics. Halliday gives his own example of using Beyonce's "All the single ladies" to teach signalling and screening theories.

Lazear on class size effects

The link below has a nice summry of Ed Lazear's work on class-size effects (h/t Alan Fernihough)
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3476106.html
A more technical version is at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=194830

Teacher quality

Everybody knows that schools differ massively in their quality. This is not just - or even especially- an Irish phenomenon. However finding the elusive factors that determine what make schools good has proved both scientifially challenging and politically tricky. There is now a fairly substantial body of evidence showng that reducing class size is not that important, certainly once it is below a certain level. Nonetheless it continues to get a lot of air-time here partly because teachers' unions like it (no surprise there) and because it is intuitively appealing.
The emphasis elsewhere has shifted, the US' No Child Left Behind Act introduced by George W. Bush focused attention on school accountability. This idea has certainly not caught on here in Ireland where lack of accountability is effectively enshrined in law: data on school performance may not be published.
Some researchers in the US, notably Eric Hanushek of Stanford University, have emphasized the importance of teacher quality. In an interesting development, policy makers have got behind the idea of teacher quality, under the Race to the Top program, and have linked states' access to funds available through the stimulus package. Specifically, states are being asked to reform around four areas:

• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

The article below from the Atlantic Monthly has a very good overview of these developments. Given the huge potential returns to society from improving educational attainments at school level (see my recent posting, link below), one wonders what does it take for policy makers, the education sector and the community generally to finally get serious about improving our schools?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/good-teaching

http://gearybehaviourcenter.blogspot.com/2010/02/high-cost-of-low-educational_12.html

Online Learning and Superstar Teachers - Cowen

fascinating post over at marginal revolution on the potential for the emergence of a model of superstar lecturers teaching thousands of students online.

link here