Teaching Economics and Providing Visual “Big Pictures”

Seyyed Ali Zeytoon Nejad Moosavian

Journal of Economics and Political Economy, 2016, vol. 3, issue 1, 119-133

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to investigate the importance of providing visual “big pictures” in the teaching of economics. The plurality and variety of concepts, variables, diagrams, and models involved in economics can be a source of confusion for many economics students. However, reviewing the existing literature on the importance of providing visual “big pictures” in the process of learning suggests that furnishing students with a visual “big picture” that illustrates the ways through which those numerous, diverse concepts are connected to each other could be an effective solution to clear up the mentioned mental chaos. As a practical example, this paper introduces a “big picture” that can be used as a good resource in intermediate macroeconomics classes. This figure presents twenty-seven commonly-discussed macroeconomic diagrams in the intermediate macroeconomics course, and gives little detail on some of these diagrams, aiming at helping students to get the whole picture at once on a single piece of paper. This macroeconomics big picture mostly focuses on the routes through which common diagrams in macroeconomics are connected to each other, and finally introduces the general macroeconomic equilibrium that is graphically derived through those connections.

Keywords: Teaching of Economics; Pedagogy; Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching; Intermediate Macroeconomics; Neoclassical; and Keynesians IS/LM/AS/AD Models. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A22 A23 E12 E13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Working Paper: Teaching Economics and Providing Visual "Big Pictures" (2016)
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