Communicating Economics materials

Published October 2026

Communicating Economics is a first-year undergraduate module developed by Chris Colvin and David Jordan at Queen’s University Belfast. It helps students critically evaluate economic arguments and communicate economic ideas clearly to specialist and non-specialist audiences. Organised around five perspectives—economics as science, literature, politics, history and philosophy—the module explores how economists use evidence, language and storytelling to inform and persuade. The syllabus provides an outline of the module, its learning outcomes and suggested readings.

Six accompanying tutorial plans translate these themes into practical activities, covering GDP in the news, opinion and misinformation, economics in The Simpsons, data visualisation, storyboarding a report on Nobel Prize-winning research, and reading Adam Smith. Each plan includes preparation tasks, learning outcomes, a timed session structure and guidance for tutors. Discussion, short presentations and peer feedback give students opportunities to practise communicating economics and reflect on how their choices affect different audiences.

The assessment strategy offers six example tasks that educators can adapt to their own teaching: reflective reading journals, short research briefing videos, take-home and examination-based op-ed writing, a data visualisation portfolio, and unseen media analysis. These tasks support a progression from evaluating others’ economic communication to constructing clear, persuasive arguments supported by evidence, with an emphasis on the kinds of communication economists undertake in professional practice.

Although designed as a first-year module, the materials can be adapted to different stages of an economics degree by varying the complexity of the economic content and the demands of the communication tasks. Introducing these skills early gives students a foundation for evaluating evidence, constructing arguments and communicating clearly that they can apply and develop in later modules. The trade-off is that students have less economic knowledge to draw on: ideas may need to be introduced in accessible, non-technical terms alongside the communication skills themselves. At later stages, the same activities can draw on more sophisticated economic analysis, with greater emphasis on translating technical knowledge for different audiences.

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