TY - JOUR
T1 - Students’ persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles
AU - Busom, Isabel
AU - Lopez-Mayan, Cristina
AU - Panadés, Judith
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Taylor & Francis.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/4/3
Y1 - 2017/4/3
N2 - Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.
AB - Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.
KW - Beliefs
KW - cognitive bias
KW - economic education
KW - psychology
KW - teaching of economics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85015743304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2017.1285735
DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2017.1285735
M3 - Article
VL - 48
SP - 74
EP - 92
JO - Journal of Economic Education
JF - Journal of Economic Education
SN - 0022-0485
IS - 2
ER -