Using Economics Blogs to Teach Economics Principles

The proliferation of widely-read blogs in the social sciences presents a pedagogical opportunity for instructors of undergraduate courses.This paper describes the introduction of blog assignments by the authors in the fall of 2011 in five principles of microeconomics classes at Western Carolina University. Students were subsequently surveyed in order to assess the impact of blog assignments on their attitudes toward economics. The survey results indicate that the blog assignments appear to have stimulated student interest in economics, while also offering a number of advantages over traditional textbook-based homework assignments. In this paper, we make the case that blog assignments are an effective pedagogical tool in economics and should be similarly successful in other social science courses.

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