Why are students failing introductory economics?

Clark Ross (Davidson College) laments the state of students in introductory economics in this article, noting that:

...performance in my own college-level introductory economics course has been faltering. This past spring, with 31 student grades administered, I had a GPA of 2.4, essentially a flat “C.”...

Performance in the course was measured with traditional testing, particularly a very comprehensive final exam. This exam, nearly identical in both questions and content to that of prior years, had 15 multiple-choice questions covering the range of introductory economics and six short-essay questions that used more precise analysis and graphing.

The student average on the exam this past spring was just below 50 percent.

 Ross, then posits five factors that have contributed to this poor performance:

First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students. They have been told not to attend class “if they are not feeling well,” and many take that warning quite literally. For instance, on the day I introduced aggregate demand and aggregate supply, having warned students how important the lecture was, I still had nearly one-third of the students absent...

Second, work outside of class was not done with consistency. The highest-achieving student was an international student for whom English was not the first language. Yet he wrote me regularly requesting specific topics and textbook pages to prepare for class. When I asked him about it, he indicated how much easier it was for him to understand the lectures if he read material in advance of class, which he rarely missed. He admitted that his friends rarely read or studied outside of class: Economic theory seemingly did not capture their interest in the same way that reading in the humanities might. Had such students regularly attended my lectures, the absence of outside preparation would have been less damaging to them. Yet missing class and not working outside of it became a fatal combination for nearly a third of the students.

Third, basic mathematics proficiency, whatever the claims of our admissions office, is greatly lacking. This observation is relatively universal among professors in the United States today. Setting up and solving simple equations, like those needed for elasticity calculations, is truly baffling to many students...

Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. They also failed to use with great frequency the able and congenial peer tutor assigned to the course. I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help.

Fifth, and finally, the introductory economics course... has remained somewhat constant. As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades. There is still a large lecture component in my course that seems dry and “outdated” to students. The traditional testing that occurs is also different from their other experiences. I fear that Economics 101 is increasingly an unpleasant outlier.

I'd say that it's likely that Ross' five factors are common to introductory economics across all of higher education, but to varying degrees. Low in-class attendance (even counting students on the live webcast) has been a particular source of frustration for me this trimester. Even having told students that attendance was a key contributor to their success (or otherwise), my ECONS101 class attendance has hovered around one-third for much of this trimester (but a lot higher in ECONS102, which is taken predominantly by economics majors). The predictable result: in the latest major assessment (with a similar format to Ross' exam), the average percentage grade for students who have been regularly attending class was 75 percent, while the average percentage grade for students not attending at all was a bit under 43 percent (and the latter is likely inflated by students who attended via webcast and did comparatively well, compared to those neither attending in-person or virtually). That isn't so different from past years, but the problem is that the proportion of students in the latter group (those not attending) has grown markedly (and despite warnings given at the start of the trimester).

Getting students to complete readings has been a challenge for a long time, but as Ross notes, it doubles down on the negative impacts on grades if students do not attend class and do not do readings. In a well-designed paper, those activities are complementary, so some learning is lost when students miss one or the other (or, increasingly, both). In some papers, students could to some extent compensate for not attending by reading more, but they are not doing that either. And when students are struggling, they are often not even seeking the help that is available. Office hours have been a bit of a joke for some time, in my experience. I could count on one hand the number of students who visit me in office hours in any given trimester. However, in my classes there are now so many ways to get help (including by reading this blog), it is difficult to say whether those other avenues are simply being used more often. Maths ability is problematic, but that factor is a problem for all subjects, not just or even specifically for economics.

All of those first four factors seem to pin a lot of the culpability for student performance on the behaviour of the students themselves. To some extent, that may be unfair, as there are things that lecturers can adjust to encourage attendance and engagement. However, the responsibility for Ross' fifth factor falls squarely on lecturers, and may be the most difficult to address. Ross provides some suggestions:

1. Explain very clearly to students, perhaps with the help of an older economics major, how to succeed in the course.
2. Give students more practice at doing problems and redoing them so they better succeed.
3. Find a way to be more welcoming and less intimidating to students seeking additional individual help.
4. Do a better job of explaining to students the relative importance of the technical material that must be applied to solve economic problems.

Or perhaps, just make lectures a bit more interactive generally? However, all of that might not be enough, when grade inflation is getting out of control. When professors are being fired (possibly paywalled for you) because their students think the class is too hard, that suggests that universities are starting to lose sight of the purpose of education, which is to have students learn something useful, not simply tick a box on their transcript. This is a point that I will return to in a future post.

[HT: Marginal Revolution for the Ross article, and Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour for the NY Times article linked at the end of this post]