I've always tried to limit the extent of maths in first-year business economics (in my ECONS101 class). It really isn't necessary for general business or management students to understand the maths underlying the economic models, if they can understand the intuition and apply the models. And burying the lead in maths simply makes it more difficult for many students to connect to the important concepts. The economics majors can always pick up the mathematics in their intermediate classes, having worked through the intuition earlier.
On the other hand, I've made extensive use of diagrams, especially in my ECONS102 class. I've even devised new diagrams to illustrate particular models or concepts (like the models of media bias described in this working paper, currently under review at a good journal). While I've been quite careful about reducing problems of students' maths anxiety, I've been less concerned about students' problems with visual representations of economic models (in the form of diagrams or graphs).
However, this 2020 article by David Fielding, Viktoria Kahui, and Dennis Wesselbaum (all University of Otago), published in the journal New Zealand Economic Papers (sorry I don't see an ungated version online), has made me pause for thought. Fielding et al. look at the relationship between visual imagination (measured using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) and performance in an undergraduate macroeconomics class examination. Specifically, they look at performance on a mathematical exam question, many graphical questions, and other (non-mathematical, non-graphical) questions, and disaggregate the results for male and female students. They find that:
...male students with poor visual imagination perform significantly worse on examination questions that are predominantly graphical, and the size of this effect is greater for those students who performed poorly on a different, mathematical question. This suggests that poor performance in graphical questions is a product of poor visual imagination and weakness in mathematics... We find similar (but only marginally significant) results for male performance on nonmathematical, non-graphical questions. One explanation for our results is that visual imagination enhances students’ ability to manipulate economics diagrams and hence the students’ examination performance...
We do not find any significant results for women, but this may just reflect (i) the fact that women make up a relatively small proportion of our sample and (ii) the fact that as in previous studies, there are fewer women with very poor visual imagination, so the range of variation for women is smaller than it is for men...
One way of interpreting these results is that students who are good mathematically and have good visual imagination have a real advantage in studying economics. Having one or the other (good mathematical skills or good visual imagination) can make up for a deficit in the other. However, students with poor mathematical skills and poor visual imagination are going to really struggle.
Having read this paper, none of that strikes me as surprising. However, it does raise an important question: how can we engage the (male) students who struggle both with maths and diagrams, so that they can understand the key economics concepts? Some economic models are easier than others to explain narratively, without recourse to either mathematics or diagrams. However, it takes a lot more effort on the part of the teacher (or, to be fair, the textbook writer) to use a narrative format well. There are a number of popular economics books that do this well (see some of my past book reviews), but integrating those into a course would require a lot of skill. However, a textbook like The Economics of Public Issues, which I use in my ECONS102 class, is a good option.
I'm hopeful that Fielding et al. will give us some further guidance on how we can improve teaching for those students. We also need further corroboration that visual imagination is only a problem for male students, and not for female students. Fielding et al. only had 28 female students in their sample, so it was quite underpowered statistically to tell us much. Anyway, this article sounds like it is the beginning of a bigger research project:
In the next stage of the research project, the authors intend to use a larger sample of students, and to measure a number of different determinants of examination performance, as well as administering the VVIQ. This will facilitate a broader study of the ways in which the vividness of visual imagery interacts with other factors in determining students’ ability to understand and explain concepts in economics.
I look forward to reading that future research.
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