What is it about?
This paper tries to determine whether different introductory economics textbooks have different learning outcomes. In some cases, the effects are significant in sizeable. In controlling for the influence of other variables, it also establishes relationships between them and learning outcomes (e.g. student quality, math background, method of delivery, etc.).
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Why is it important?
Faculty devote significant energy to selecting textbooks and students collectively spend millions of dollars purchasing them. Therefore, understanding whether the choice of textbook matters is clearly important. Understanding how other factors also affect learning outcomes is also important.
Perspectives
I usually do not do empirical work. However, I was teaching econometrics for the first time and spent the morning preparing a lesson plan on dummy variables. Over lunch, some colleagues were debating whether the choice of textbooks made any difference, or if they are all basically the same. It occurred to me that it would be a rather straightforward (or so I thought at the time) issue to test
Derek Pyne
Thompson Rivers University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Does the Choice of Introductory Microeconomics Textbook Matter?, The Journal of Economic Education, July 2007, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.3200/jece.38.3.279-296.
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