Learning to Reason with Economics

Teaching Students to “Think like Economists” as Democratic Citizenship Preparation

“…Economic reasoning studies, albeit scarce, have been most notably conducted in the field of expert versus novice reasoning. VanSickle (1992) found that economists not only have greater economic content knowledge (i.e., declarative knowledge) than high school students but also knew when and how to apply economic reasoning skills more effectively (i.e., procedural knowledge). Similarly, Miller and VanFossen (1994) and VanFossen (1995) used a “think aloud” process to make explicit the way economists went about solving economic problems as compared to their novice, high school counterparts, also finding that economists applied far greater economic reasoning skills.…”

“…The EWT principles also serve as an instructional framework that shows the relationships between basic economic concepts, thus offer an accessible schema for teaching and learning economics (VanSickle, 1992). The Council for Economic Education (2012) has gone as far as to suggest the EWT “should be the cornerstone of the nation's efforts to reform the educational system” to better prepare students for the 21st century workforce (p. iv).…”

Does discipline matter? Pedagogical approaches to critical thinking in English for academic purposes (EAP) and economics

“…These detailed descriptions of what it means to think like an economist (Siegfried et al, 1991) illustrates that this definition is held together by an underlying notion of general human reasoning, as discussed by VanSickle (1992). He implies that knowledge of Economics itself, the content, is necessary to learn how to reason with Economic concepts and principles in order to solve Economic problems.…”

“…However, the third transition urges the students to go one step further and apply these methods outside of the context of the classroom. This is a critical aspect of this transition leading up to the fourth mode of thinking and begins to divide thinkers into novices and experts (VanSickle, 1992).…”

“…According to VanSickle (1992), novice problem solvers tend to skip general analysis of a problem's context or identify sub-problems, and they do not address larger issues underlying these sub-problems. In contrast, expert problem solvers take aspects from various aspects of life and experience and combine it with theory.…”