The author presents an active-learning exercise for the introductory macroeconomics class in which students participate in a mock Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. Preparation involves data gathering and writing both a research report and a policy recommendation. An FOMC meeting is...

The author discusses the following seven issues affecting assessment of undergraduates in universities: decisionmaking and the selection of tests, the use of written and oral assignments to measure learning, the characteristics of grades and portfolios for evaluating students, opportunities for...

Recent research has demonstrated that active learning techniques improve student comprehension and retention of abstract economic ideas such as rent seeking. Instructors can reinforce the concept of rent seeking with a classroom game, particularly one involving real money. The authors improve...

The author outlines a classroom tariff-setting game that allows students to explore the consequences of import tariffs imposed by large countries (countries able to influence world prices). Groups of students represent countries, which are organized into trading pairs. Each group’s...

Abstract. In many cost-sensitive environments class probabilityestimates are used by decision makers to evaluate the expected utilityfrom a set of alternatives. Supervised learning can be used to buildclass probability estimates; however, it often is very costly to obtaintraining data with class...