Chinese and Economic Growth

One of the things I really enjoy about teaching economics is the application to everday life. While I make it a point to make these connections in class, I was becoming frustrated by the students' lack of application in quizzes and tests.

Back in the States when I was teaching World and US History, one of the large types of assessments were Document Based Questions or DBQ's. Obviously the purpose of these in a history class is to help the students evaluate historical events from different perspectives. It dawned on me that that is ultimately what we want our kids to do with topics such as the role of government in the economy or the impact on different stakeholders in our economics classes.

One of the most challenging parts of creating a DBQ is finding the articles or documents that will be used for the students. Back in April of this year my school hosted the European L2 Conference. Here I was reintroduced to Flipboard and the possible applications to the classroom. I plan on writing more about it in a further blog post, but in the end it is a great way for students and teachers alike to have a spot to aggregate news articles. Finding appropriate Internal Assessment (IA) articles always seems to a challenge for my students and this year I have decided to make a more focused effort on practicing this skill with my students.

The directions on the first slide were given to the students the class before we actually completed the China Economic Growth Case Study. This part of the process allowed me to examine what articles the students were 'flipping' into our magazine. The purpose of the assignment served a few main purposes:

1. Allowed my students to practice finding articles for their IA.
2. Provided me feedback on the appropriateness of articles my students were able to find.
3. Gave me a sample of articles in which I could choose from to add to our case study.

Once I had a few articles to select from, I chose a few relevant selections that would serve the purpose for my students evaluating the consequences of economic growth. While I had a couple of  articles that I found already, a few of my students were able to find very appropriate articles. Acknowledging these students in class hopefully further motivated them when doing this again in our sections of the syllabus.

In the end I thought the articles presented to the students not only reflect what the learning objectives were for evaluating economic growth, but presented the information in manageable chunks allowing the students to buy in. I'm not thrilled with the final piece where the students come up with a thesis statement, but for a Friday lesson it worked nicely for both the students and me.

I would love to hear what other people do for helping their kids practice not only finding relevant articles for their internal assessment, but also how you are practicing those higher level thinking skills.