Author: Johann K. Jaeckel
Recently, I started using a new teaching technique in my Principles of Economics course. The course starts with an introduction to the canonical models of production, specialization, and market exchange. My primary theme for the first few weeks is to frame economic analysis as the study of social coordination problems.
A coordination problem engages with how the outcomes of individual activities (i.e. decisions made by people on an individual level) can be reconciled with the outcomes of group activities in such a way that the results are desirable at both levels. In my experience, it can be difficult for students who are new to economics to think about social issues from this perspective; consequently, I have been looking for a hands-on classroom activity to demonstrate the nature of a coordination problem. There are numerous economic classroom experiments that try to do just that (for instance, see here, here, and here), but most of the available scenarios tend to bear little real-world relevance and often feel rather contrived to me.
It turns out that I didn’t have to look very far for a coordination which matters to the students: I found one in the review session that I conduct before every exam. Before this session I post a comprehensive study guide and let the students know that the questions on the actual exam are selected from this list. At the beginning of the session I announce that conducting the review is up to the students and that I will temporarily resign from my role as the instructor.
This institutional vacuum creates a concrete coordination problem in the sense that students have to find a way, preferably the ‘best’ one , to run the session by themselves. To prevent a complete breakdown of social order, I usually pick a volunteer to facilitate the group work and make it clear that I can be called upon as a ‘joker’ for a limited number of questions.
I ran this experiment in several sections with considerably different results, ranging from self-organized horizontal cooperation to, for lack of a better term, autocratic chaos. The outcomes, as one would expect, are highly sensitive to the level of student preparation, the choice of the facilitator, and the dynamics of a given group.
There were noticeable differences between ‘procedural’ and ‘non-procedural’ approaches. In two of the sections students briefly discussed how to go about the review before they started working, while in another section this question came up only five minutes before the end of class. Which approach students adopted may be an indicator for which group immediately recognized the situation to be a coordination problem, and which did not.
All sections struggled with adapting to the new scenario, albeit to different degrees. In general, it seems that the better the relation between the facilitator and a group, and the clearer the procedure is, the less the students address me for support. In turn, it was more or less difficult for me not to fall back into the role of the teacher.
None of the sections adopted any kind of market mechanism to confront the problem, such as trying to find a price for a correct answer. Some people have remarked that this is no big surprise. It is noteworthy to me, though, since at this point the students have been drilled in the textbook arguments about the advantages of market-based solutions to coordination problems. But, this is another discussion.
After the exam I assign a short reflective essay and follow up with a class discussion in which I explicitly frame the review session as an experiment in finding a solution to a coordination problem. I think this teaching technique, which is taking advantage of linkages between the course content and the format of an individual session is worth developing. In addition to promoting practical group work skills (facilitation, organization, participation), the experiment confronts students with the difficulties, as well as the various possibilities, of creating rules and relations to negotiate individual contributions and needs in a group setting.
A draft version of this article discussing some additional aspects of the experiment is available here.