While evidence abounds that students are not learning enough from their college economics courses, and more than half a century long effort is ongoing to improve the teaching methods in economics, there is as yet no effort by the economics profession to investigate the causes of poor learning. Some researchers have begun to document and classify the various pre-conceptions that beginning students of economics seem to bring to the classroom. However, there have been no studies so far to investigate any underlying cognitive biases which cause poor learning of economic theory. Behavioral economics may provide important clues to any cognitive biases and heuristics which may cause beginning students of economics to misunderstand and consistently misapply economic theory. This book is a call to research for economists, and particularly behavioral economists, to investigate the causes of poor learning in economics. In addition to reviewing the learning theories which have so far informed the pedagogical experiments by economists, the book will set forth a research agenda and describe various field experiments that can be conducted to (1) systematically explore how students form some common pre-conceptions about economics; (2) understand the extent to which preconceptions tend to cause further misconceptions in
economics and to identify the pre-conceptions which tend to be more persistent than others; (3) the extent to which textbook presentation formats and/or teaching methods cause misconceptions of economic theory; (4) the extent to which student/teacher personality types interfere with proper learning of economic theory. The author will present evidence from her own pedagogical experiments to inform and motivate the research questions.
