1) Last year I published this paper: Bottan, Daria, Douglas McKee, George Orlov, and Anna McDougall. 'Racial and Gender Achievement Gaps in an Economics Classroom.'International Review of Economics Education (2022): 100239. This year the paper was awarded 'Best Paper' award for that journal in 2022. 2) I started a new research project: Using Extra Credit to facilitate engagement and learning. Abstract: I have been teaching Principles of Microeconomics for more than a decade. Few instructors disagree with the fact that engaging students is important for learning. How to actually engage students is a more difficult question. One of the concepts students often struggle with is a distinction between Demand and Quantity Demanded. In this paper I illustrate how incentivizing students with extra credit can help them engage and as a result improve their understanding of concepts. I assigned students an extra credit exercise which was about explaining the difference between demand and quantity demanded. The amount of students answering the question on the topic wrongly decreased by 27% compared to a previous semester where I taught similarly but did not assign that extra credit exercise. This illustrates to me how engaging students with the material is beneficial for their learning: they can potentially explain things better to themselves than I can explain to them. 3) I am in process of trying to publish my other paper: 'Teaching as Art: what lesson from theater can we bring into teaching?'. Got a rejection, rewriting it.
