Why Xtranomics

I believe that if my students learn to think like an economist, they will succeed in any endeavor. This means that I can have a long term positive influence on my students by teaching them the Economic Way of Thinking.

This leads to the question: how best to teach them? Well, since you are on this website, you know my answer must be to use Xtranormal software. That would be correct. But I would like to give you a back-story. Maybe you will find that you are going through what I went through. 

I used to be standard chalk talker. I was pretty funny, gave interesting lectures, the students gave me nice evaluations and the students performed on exams reasonably well. But as I got to know the students better, I began to realize that what I was teaching them seemed to lack stickiness. Even students that did well in my class only seemed to be using what they were taught in the very same context that they learned it. There was a big disconnect between what I thought I was teaching and what my students were learning. Luckily, I read a copy of Ken Bain’s book, What the Best Teachers Do, and found a study by Halloun and Hestenes (1985) that put this question of retention to a very interesting test. Here is the abstract:

An instrument to assess the basic knowledge state of students taking a first course in physics has been designed and validated. Measurements with the instrument show that the student’s initial qualitative, common sense beliefs about motion and causes has a large effect on performance in physics, but conventional instruction induces only a small change in those beliefs.

Halloun and Hestenes surveyed students before they took a physics class. The students held Aristotelian beliefs about motion. The students then take the physics class where they learn Newtonian motion. The students are then surveyed again and still hold Aristotelian beliefs about motion.

Reading this paper was a real wake up call for me. What was I doing putting so much energy into teaching my students if even the top students were not retaining anything. I know some hold the view that education is simply used as a signal to employers (see Spence 1973). But I decided that this was not going to be true for my class. It was time to tinker.

Chance favors only the prepared mind.    -Louis Pasteur

I went into a real deep mode of trying to understand why I remember things and I started asking people about their earliest good memories (I didn't want to upset them). I found that strong emotions and passion were the most common response. I had to get my students' passion level up and I also had to somehow get strong positive emotions associated with the Economic Way of Thinking. Then I got lucky. 

In August 2009, I ran across a video (totally unrelated to economics) on youtube that had been made with xtranormal software and I knew right away that I was somehow going to implement this software into my class. By having my students create short movies with a few requirements, the Economic Way of Thinking was going to enter their world, their outside of the classroom world. I was of the belief that while it may be hard to be passionate about a Principles of Economics class, it is hard not to be passionate about a film you create. It was now time to design and put the Xtranomics project to the test.

See: Xtranomics and the New Science of Learning for the  Xtranormal Project design and how the Xtranormal Project fits in with recent research on learning