Evaluating Social Media and Its Impact on Engagement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Principles of Economics Courses

Ever since Becker and Watts (1996) and, more recently, Watts and Schaur (2011) found that economic educators rely heavily on “chalk and talk” as a primary teaching method, economic educators have been seeking new ways to engage students and improve learning outcomes. Recently, the use of social media as a pedagogical tool in economics has received increasing interest. Kassens (2014) and Al-Bahrani and Patel (2015) provide guides on how to incorporate social media into the classroom but, to our knowledge, no one has attempted to quantify the impact of social media on student learning outcomes in economics education. We attempt to fill this void by conducting a formal assessment of students in Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics across three different institutions to see if the use of Twitter increases engagement and/or improves learning outcomes. Each researcher taught concurrent sections of the same principles course, with one section randomly serving as the control group and the other as the treatment group. Students in the treatment group are strongly encouraged to follow the instructor on Twitter, where supplementary course material is posted. In the control group, students only receive the supplemental material through a Learning Management System (LMS), such as Blackboard. The outcome variables of interest are scores on a TUCE exam taken at the beginning and end of the course, as well as final course grades. Preliminary results suggest no definitive link between the use of Twitter and improved learning outcomes, but offer mixed evidence in terms of student engagement