Writing for Economists: Embedding the Development of Writing Skills in Economics Courses

An Economics Network funded project, 2005-6

Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Project leaders: Dr Margaret Bray and Dr Jonathan Leape
Contacts: j.leape@lse.ac.uk, n.d.mclean@lse.ac.uk

This project embeds a blended learning approach to teaching writing skills into undergraduate economics program in order to Increase student competence and confidence in producing professional economics texts by:

• integrating teaching and assessment of written work into a technical economics syllabus
• producing new resource materials in the form of an interactive, web based writing course available to students, which is deliverable through a VLE.

Continuation funding 2006-7

This project will develop and extend the use of VLE in developing writing skills for economics students. Currently the designed material focuses on coursework essay writing and will be extended to exam essay writing and internship application forms. Produced resources will be available from the Economics Network Web site. It will also develop and consolidate the existing embedding of writing skills into the course design, materials and teacher training in response to the experiences of last year.

Outputs

Writing for Economics: an online tutorial including real examples of student work and marker's comments