Conference and seminar sessions in Classroom practice and student engagement
What determines the sense of belonging of economics students to their university?
Presentation at DEE 2025,We’re writing what? A review of published evaluations of interventions in economics classrooms
Presentation at DEE 2025,Social Media as a Pedagogical Tool: Engaging Students and Promoting Research-Led Teaching
Workshop at DEE 2025,Student Absenteeism in Undergraduate Economics Education: Comparative Evidence from Lectures and Tutorials
Presentation at DEE 2025,Using adaptive reading to improve student engagement and attainment
Presentation at DEE 2025,Would they produce a higher quality of work if they felt they were being more authentic? The (de)valuing of authentic connections in teaching and learning
Presentation at DEE 2025,The Use of Social Networks to Improve Engagement and Implement and Research-Led Curriculum
Presentation at Northern Economics Network seminars,Beyond "Chalk and Talk": Bringing Economics to Life in the Classroom
Presentation at Exeter Pedagogy, Economics, Research, and Teaching seminars (ExPERTS),The use of social networks to implement a research-led curriculum
Presentation at DEE 2023,Common ground: Using authenticity to make connections in teaching
Presentation at DEE 2023,Empowering students for active economic citizenship: Enhancing financial proficiency through experimental learning in a university with a focus on diversity and inclusion
Presentation at DEE 2023,The Xs, the Ys, the Zs: Challenges in internalising generational gaps in teaching
Presentation at DEE 2023,Sparking joy in economics teaching
Keynote at DEE 2023,Does nudging higher education students improve attendance? A quasi-natural experiment
Presentation at DEE 2023,Becoming the confident learner: insights from an exploratory quantitative analysis of in-module data
Presentation at DEE 2023,Economics teaching in the post-COVID classroom
Presentation at DEE 2023,Information Interventions to Counter Procrastination
Presentation at DEE 2023,IREE best paper presentation: The economics instructor's toolbox
Presentation at DEE 2021,The CORE pedagogy: is there a difference in student performance and engagement?
Presentation at DEE 2021,Goal setting and implementation intentions to improve educational outcomes
Presentation at DEE 2021,A critical review of the socio/economic influences on attendance patterns within a H4 economics cohort
Presentation at DEE 2021,To block or not to block: Does teaching delivery method affect students’ performance and learning experience?
Presentation at DEE 2021,Studying without distractions? The effect of a digital blackout on academic performance
Presentation at DEE 2021,The effect of class attendance on student performance
Presentation at DEE 2019,Class attendance is regarded as important in higher education. In reality, however, absenteeism is reported rampant in undergraduate courses at universities (Romer, 1993). Romer (1993) found that, on average, one-third of students are absent from undergraduate Intermediate Macroeconomics courses at three major US universities. There has been considerable debate concerning the impact of class attendance on academic performance and mixed evidence is found. Using a sample of economics second-year undergraduate students in a UK university, my preliminary analysis suggests that class attendance has a significantly positive impact on academic performance and this finding is robust to different control variables. I also discuss possible approaches to foster higher class attendance rate. Moreover, I am now trying to get a larger dataset on Economics undergraduate students at UCL to investigate how lecturecast affects class attendance and whether the relationship between class attendance and academic performance depends on the availability of lecturecast.
Constructive alignment: e-learning and assessment
Presentation at DEE 2019,The constructive alignment pedagogical principle asserts that effective teaching creates the most appropriate learning activities, which are the ones aligned with the learning objectives (Shuell, 1986)*. Moreover, students’ engagement in such learning activities is as important, if not more, than what teachers do in the classroom. Finally, effective teaching and learning is inspired by reflective practice, from both lecturers and students. In this paper, we apply the constructive alignment principle to e-learning. Our main aim is to shed light on the drivers of e-learning optimal design, in the context of encouraging deep learning. Our empirical exercise is based on data on UCL Economics students and their journey through our undergraduate programmes. In particular, we consider the relationship between e-learning, assessment (and e-assessment) for teaching effectiveness, as measured by students’ outcomes. Despite being Economics specific, we are confident that our exercise can be replicated and extended to other disciplines. The intended outcome of this project is to identify guidelines to help lecturers design an effective e-learning environment for different kinds of students. *Shuell, T.J. (1986). 'Cognitive conceptions of learning', Review of Educational Research 56, 411-436.
Political economy: a serious play
Presentation at DEE 2019,The paper describes an in-progress experience of teaching contemporary macroeconomics through theatre as a mean of understanding and comparison of different approaches. In 2014-15 professor Morroni wrote a play, where one "junior" and two "senior" economists meet by chance and discuss about the economic crises. It was staged by a group of students. The encouraging outcome suggested to continue along two paths. First, to look for people, in the academic environment, trained in theatrical acting, to stage the play at the STOREP conference held in Catania in 2016 and in their institutions, and to make contact with a professional stage director, who, since then, has been working with the students. Secondly, to write a refined version of the text. As a result, the play has been successfully proposed in different Universities, bookshops, clubs, associations etc. in Italy. Students have reached a satisfying level in this way of expressing economic contents, and they have even written themselves a new play, in the form of a dialogue, dealing with "hot" socio-economic issues in the Italian and European debate. The author has published a refined version of the play in Italian (Mario MORRONI, Nulla è come appare. Dialoghi sulle verità sommerse della crisi economica, Reggio Emilia, Imprimatur, 2016), and, revised and updated, in English (Mario MORRONI What is the Truth About the Great Recession and Increasing Inequality? Dialogues on Disputed Issues and Conflicting Theories, Springer Nature, 2018). The show goes on!
Building capacities to help students learn in lectures
Presentation at DEE 2019,An action research project was initiated at the Economics department at the University of York to increase active learning in lectures. Passive students and the challenge of covering the content in time were initially thought to be the main issues to overcome. However, the research uncovered several problems facing students in lectures and seminars that had not been previously surfaced. Having used an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach, the research was able to go beyond the negative and draw out what students appreciated about their learning experience. It also motivated the participants to find creative solutions and become the catalyst for several initiatives in the department. This session will detail the findings and put forward proposals for further research that can be undertaken to better understand Economics education.
Make Lectures Match How We Learn: The Nonlinear Teaching Approach
Presentation at DEE 2017,This paper proposes a nonlinear teaching approach based on learning theories in cognitive psychology, with a special focus on undergraduate economics courses. The fundamental rationale is to match the feature of teaching with the nature of learning. A comprehensive literature based on which the nonlinear teaching approached is developed has been reviewed and compared. The approach is implemented to an undergraduate economics module, which is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively. Formal econometric models with both binary and continuous treatment effects are developed and estimated to quantify the evaluation. Evidence shows that the proposed non-linear teaching approach significantly improves the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning process, but does not promote the student attendance.
The impact of targeted workshops on engagement and performance for under-performing students
Presentation at DEE 2017,Academic under-performance is often associated with disengagement on the part of under-performing students. In large university cohorts, if students start to dis-engage from their programme of study, it is often difficult for educators to re-establish a productive engagement with these students. In order to start this process of re-engagement, targeted workshops for second year and final year students were run. Students who were identified as under-performing were invited to attend workshops at the beginning of the academic year and at the beginning of the second semester. These workshops asked students to discuss their levels of engagement, reasons for limited engagement, student perceptions of time commitments for private study and specific goals that these students had on entering their programme and their current goals. We investigate the impact of these workshop interventions to see if student attendance improved and academic performance improved. We also investigate differences between second year and final year students for both their opinions and the effectiveness of the workshops for both cohorts.
Herding in the classroom - an experiment
Presentation at DEE 2017,My project looks at how students are influenced by their peers' responses to in-class questions. In particular, I study whether students' knowledge about the distribution of answers provided by their classmates to a multiple-choice question affects their subsequent answer. I carried out an experiment in an upper-level undergraduate economics field module where students were asked to respond to at least 2-3 multiple-choice questions in each lecture session. Answers were submitted using a web-based audience response system. Students were shown the distribution of answers from the entire class of about 20 students, and then asked the same question again. I recorded whether or not students changed their answers, whether the answers were correct in the first instance and eventually, and various demographic characteristics of the students, and whom they were sitting with. Any movement towards the modal answer is labelled as herding. My analysis looks at what determines students' proclivity to herd, including individual characteristics, the characteristics of their immediate peers and the type of question. Any systematic patterns in the herding behaviour can be used to influence the organization of peer learning groups - if students are more likely to learn from peers with particular characteristics, lecturers may want to design "think-pair-share" or other kind of group learning activities with these characteristics in mind.
An Adventure in Flipping: A ‘Meta’ Workshop
Workshop at DEE 2017,The use of technology in and around the classroom offers a multitude of opportunities for academics to improve the student experience; from improved interaction and engagement in sessions to further facilitation of student employability skills. However, for many this technology can be pervasive and threaten classroom cohesion. This workshop aims to ease such fears by offering two case studies where technology is embedded within the learning process. The first considers how to use technology to ‘flip’ the classroom and the second case study is the workshop itself, where the audience will be participants using technology to interact with each other and the presenters to break the ‘fourth wall’. The ‘Flipped Classroom’ approach is where the ‘classic’ model of university learning is altered so that students view traditional lecture content as video prior to scheduled contact time and then they complete exercises in the classroom. The innovation has been hailed as a transformative experience for learners and teachers. This session will tell the story of the redesign of an economics module to a ‘flipped classroom’ approach. Much of the focus will be on the experience of the redesigned delivery and how to get the best out of it, but there will also be discussion on the genesis of the idea, the planning of the redesign, and the recording of the videos. Additionally, the redesigned module integrates team learning and technology to allow interaction, we shall mirror this throughout the workshop so that the audience has a chance to use this technology.
Characteristics that Predict the Likelihood of a Student Experiencing Grade Success in Principles of Micro and Macroeconomics
Presentation at DEE 2017,While much attention has focused on the factors affecting student performance in principles of economics, far less consideration has been paid to factors affecting attrition. Using student transcripts from five institutions over a 23-year timespan, we investigate enrollments in principles to determine characteristics of both successful and unsuccessful students. Lack of success is defined as either withdrawing from the course or as earning a grade that would not generally allow continued study, i.e., a grade below C- or an unsatisfactory or incomplete. Principles of microeconomics students tend to be early in their undergraduate careers, male, and Caucasian. We find that micro principles students come from a range of majors with large shares from business and engineering, math and physics. Unsuccessful micro students tend to be female, minority, have a lower cumulative GPA, and to be majoring in something other than economics, business, engineering, math or physics. Analysis of the principles of macroeconomics course is underway to determine whether a different set of characteristics explain success rates across introductory courses.
Using Technology to Complete the Natural Learning Path in a Principles of Economics Course
Presentation at DEE 2017,The traditional learning path of a student in a principles of economics course is changing. Traditionally, this learning path has begun with the student attending a classroom session to receive content from the instructor (usually in a chalk and talk lecture format), then completing assessment activities at home related to that lecture. The drawback of this learning path is that it is incomplete; it does not offer adequate feedback to the student’s work. A new classroom model (often called the “flipped classroom”) offers a way to complete the cycle. This model involves the student receiving lecture content before class, then completing problems and other peer-learning activities with the instructor in the classroom, and finally completing more challenging assessments at the end of the cycle. But while applications of this new model are gaining in popularity, they have tended to focus more on the instructor’s experience and less on the explicit changes to the student’s learning path. In other words, there has been little work on how to bridge the student’s pre-lecture work with classroom activities. This paper supports a new learning path model, one that introduces a critical component called “bridge questions” that connect the work students complete prior to class with the work they do during class. We offer best practices for instructors to develop effective learning paths for their students. The most important benefit of an effective learning path is to maximize the value of the work students do with their peers and the instructor in the classroom.
