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Learning Goals for Economics Majors

As part of the Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative (USLI), the Economics Department has developed the following learning goals for the Economics major. The USLI is a campuswide initiative to support departments in establishing educational goals and evaluation procedures for all undergraduate programs. As a result of the initiative, faculty and students will have a shared understanding of the purpose of the major and what graduating seniors are expected to know or to be able to do at the end of their course of study. The initiative is in keeping with the fundamental principle at Berkeley that the evaluation of student achievement should be locally defined, discipline specific, and faculty driven.

Economics is the study of how people make choices under conditions of scarcity and the results of those choices for society. Limited resources make tradeoffs necessary for consumers, businesses, and nations. Microeconomics studies how consumers make choices in using their time and spending their income, and how businesses make choices in producing and selling goods and services. Macroeconomics studies the determination of national income, and how it deviates from its potential (full employment) over the business cycle. The important outcomes for the national economy are income and how it is distributed, unemployment, inflation, economic growth, and how well financial markets and international trade are functioning. Economic is important in studying the impact of government policies, ranging from regulatory activities in individual markets to general measures for stabilizing and steering the economy at large. The effect of alternative economic policies on the welfare of the population is a core concern in economics. Undergraduates should have the following knowledge and skills when they graduate with an Economics Major from UC Berkeley. The Economics Department wants our majors to have knowledge of economics principles with the skills to apply this knowledge in the following ways:

I. Critical Thinking Skills

CT1. Apply economic analysis to evaluate everyday problems.

CT2. Apply economic analysis to evaluate specific policy proposals.

CT3. Compare two or more arguments that have different conclusions to a specific issue or problem.

CT4. Understand the role of assumptions in arguments.

II. Quantitative Reasoning Skills

QT1. Understand how to use empirical evidence to evaluate an economic argument.

QT2. Interpret statistical results.

QT3. Conduct appropriate statistical analysis of data, and explain the statistical problems involved.

QT4. Obtain and/or collect relevant data using specific qualitative and/or quantitative research methods.

III. Problem-Solving Skills

PS1. Solve problems that have clear solutions.

PS2. Propose solutions for problems that do not have clear answers, and indicate under what conditions they may be viable solutions.

IV. Specialized Knowledge and Application of Skills

SP1. In specific content areas (fields) of economics, develop deeper critical and quantitative thinking skills and apply problem-solving skills to complex problems.

V. Communication Skills

CS1. Communicate effectively in written, spoken, and graphical form about specific economic issues.

CS2. Formulate a well-organized written argument that states assumptions and hypotheses, which are supported by evidence.

CS3. Present an economic argument orally.

VI. Lifelong Learning Skills

LL1. Possess a working knowledge of information data bases (e.g., Econ Lit, Nexis-Lexis)

LL2. Know how to locate and use primary data sources (e.g., BLS Household Survey, UN Human Development Index)

LL3. Understand and evaluate current economic events and new economic ideas.

Assessment of Learning Goals

(pilots for Spring and Fall 2009)

Mapping Learning Goals to Courses

Each semester instructors of undergraduate courses state on the syllabus the most important learning goals that students develop in the course. The department collects the syllabi and updates the learning goals matrix each semester. The Undergraduate Committee annually reviews the learning goals for courses to ensure consistency and to evaluate how well the curriculum provides adequate opportunity for majors to achieve mastery of all learning goals before graduation.

A matrix that shows how majors achieve mastery of the learning goals in the core courses and upper division electives is provided below.

         Learning Goals for Core Courses in Economics

         Learning Goals for Upper Division Electives

Pilot Course to Teach Written Communication Skills

In Spring 2009, a pilot course (Econ 196, Topics in Economic Research) was developed and offered to provide upper division students with the opportunity to develop written communication skills in Economics. Econ 196 accommodated approximately 150 students. The course consists of 45 hours of lectures, and students have required weekly readings, from which they choose two topics to write two short papers (12-15 pages). The readings and lectures focus on recent research and policy developments in public finance, labor economics, game theory, experimental economics, behavioral economics, international economics and economic development. The course has a lead instructor, who organizes lectures given by fifteen faculty members in the Economics department, who volunteer their time. The core objective is to expose students to different aspects of research in economics and how it influences policy, and to provide majors with the opportunity to write two papers in economics. Students are assisted in writing their papers by two graduate student tutors who grade the papers.

Pilot to Directly Assess Specific Learning Goals

        In Spring 2009, Economics implemented an assessment pilot that evaluated specific exam questions or written assignments in three selected upper division courses, where a question or assignment had been designated as representing student performance in specific learning goals. Econ did this for three learning goals: critical thinking (in a popular upper division elective), analytical reasoning (in a required quantitative methods course), and written communication (in a large pilot course that focuses on writing a short research paper). Note that the outcome does not indicate what students learned in the particular course but is a measure of their cumulative learning.

        The instructor in each course designated a grade that demonstrates the minimal mastery expected of Economics majors for the specific learning goal in the assignment. The grades for these assignments were recorded separately along with the distribution of the grades and the minimum grade required to demonstrate proficiency for the goal(s). Given the grade distribution by student SID, the department can sort out our majors (from other students) and also sort out our graduating seniors.

        The Learning Goals Committee, with input from the Undergraduate Committee and from the instructors who executed the assessment in the three courses, will assess the value of this pilot as a direct measurement of majors' performance and its value in evaluating and improving the undergraduate program. Economics will decide how to revise the pilot and use it to develop an on-going assessment process of upper division courses on a rotating basis. We will also explore how to put selected examples of student work from each of these assessment pilots online to show our majors' educational performance and achievement of Economics learning goals.