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Pedagogical foundation

Throughout the OpenStax version of Principles of Economics , you will find new features that engage the students in economic inquiry by taking selected topics a step further. Our features include:

  • Bring It Home: This added feature is a brief case study, specific to each chapter, which connects the chapter’s main topic to the real word. It is broken up into two parts: the first at the beginning of the chapter (in the Intro module) and the second at chapter’s end, when students have learned what’s necessary to understand the case and “bring home” the chapter’s core concepts.
  • Work It Out: This added feature asks students to work through a generally analytical or computational problem, and guides them step-by-step to find out how its solution is derived.
  • Clear It Up: This boxed feature, which includes pre-existing features from Taylor’s text, addresses common student misconceptions about the content. Clear It Ups are usually deeper explanations of something in the main body of the text. Each CIU starts with a question. The rest of the feature explains the answer.
  • Link It Up: This added feature is a very brief introduction to a website that is pertinent to students’ understanding and enjoyment of the topic at hand.

Questions for each level of learning

The OpenStax version of Principles of Economics further expands on Taylor’s original end of chapter materials by offering four types of end-of-module questions for students.

  • Self-Checks: Are analytical self-assessment questions that appear at the end of each module. They “click–to-reveal” an answer in the web view so students can check their understanding before moving on to the next module. Self-Check questions are not simple look-up questions. They push the student to think a bit beyond what is said in the text. Self-Check questions are designed for formative (rather than summative) assessment. The questions and answers are explained so that students feel like they are being walked through the problem.
  • Review Questions: Have been retained from Taylor’s version, and are simple recall questions from the chapter and are in open-response format (not multiple choice or true/false). The answers can be looked up in the text.
  • Critical Thinking Questions: Are new higher-level, conceptual questions that ask students to demonstrate their understanding by applying what they have learned in different contexts. They ask for outside-the-box thinking, for reasoning about the concepts. They push the student to places they wouldn’t have thought of going themselves.
  • Problems: Are exercises that give students additional practice working with the analytic and computational concepts in the module.

Updated art

Principles of Economics includes an updated art program to better inform today’s student, providing the latest data on covered topics.

U.s. minimum wage and inflation

sample image
After adjusting for inflation, the federal minimum wage dropped more than 30 percent from 1967 to 2010, even though the nominal figure climbed from $1.40 to $7.25 per hour.Increases in the minimum wage in 2007, 2008, and 2009 kept the decline from being worse—as it would have been if the wage had remained the same as it did from 1997 through 2006. (Sources: http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm; http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?cu)

About our team

Senior contributing author

Timothy Taylor, Macalester College
Timothy Taylor has been writing and teaching about economics for 30 years, and is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives , a post he’s held since 1986. He has been a lecturer for The Teaching Company, the University of Minnesota, and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, where students voted him Teacher of the Year in 1997. His writings include numerous pieces for journals such as the Milken Institute Review and The Public Interest , and he has been an editor on many projects, most notably for the Brookings Institution and the World Bank, where he was Chief Outside Editor for the World Development Report 1999/2000, Entering the 21st Century: The Changing Development Landscape . He also blogs four to five times per week at http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com. Timothy Taylor lives near Minneapolis with his wife Kimberley and their three children.

Steven A. Greenlaw, University of Mary Washington
Steven Greenlaw has been teaching principles of economics for more than 30 years. In 1999, he received the Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Mary Washington. He is the author of Doing Economics: A Guide to Doing and Understanding Economic Research , as well as a variety of articles on economics pedagogy and instructional technology, published in the Journal of Economic Education , the International Review of Economic Education , and other outlets. He wrote the module on Quantitative Writing for Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics , the web portal on best practices in teaching economics. Steven Greenlaw lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Kathy and their three children.

Contributing authors

Eric Dodge Hanover College
Cynthia Gamez University of Texas at El Paso
Andres Jauregui Columbus State University
Diane Keenan Cerritos College
Dan MacDonald California State University San Bernardino
Amyaz Moledina The College of Wooster
Craig Richardson Winston-Salem State University
David Shapiro Pennsylvania State University
Ralph Sonenshine American University

Expert reviewers

Bryan Aguiar Northwest Arkansas Community College
Basil Al Hashimi Mesa Community College
Emil Berendt Mount St. Mary's University
Zena Buser Adams State University
Douglas Campbell The University of Memphis
Sanjukta Chaudhuri University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
Xueyu Cheng Alabama State University
Robert Cunningham Alma College
Rosa Lea Danielson College of DuPage
Steven Deloach Elon University
Debbie Evercloud University of Colorado Denver
Sal Figueras Hudson County Community College
Reza Ghorashi Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Robert Gillette University of Kentucky
Shaomin Huang Lewis-Clark State College
George Jones University of Wisconsin-Rock County
Charles Kroncke College of Mount St. Joseph
Teresa Laughlin Palomar Community College
Carlos Liard-Muriente Central Connecticut State University
Heather Luea Kansas State University
Steven Lugauer University of Notre Dame
William Mosher Nashua Community College
Michael Netta Hudson County Community College
Nick Noble Miami University
Joe Nowakowski Muskingum University
Shawn Osell University of Wisconsin, Superior
Mark Owens Middle Tennessee State University
Sonia Pereira Barnard College
Brian Peterson Central College
Jennifer Platania Elon University
Robert Rycroft University of Mary Washington
Adrienne Sachse Florida State College at Jacksonville
Hans Schumann Texas AM
Gina Shamshak Goucher College
Chris Warburton John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
Mark Witte Northwestern
Chiou-nan Yeh Alabama State University

Ancillaries

OpenStax projects offer an array of ancillaries for students and instructors. Please visit http://openstaxcollege.org and view the learning resources for this title.

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Source:  OpenStax, Principles of economics. OpenStax CNX. Sep 19, 2014 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11613/1.11
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