TESTS OF THE SUCCESS OF THE PRINCIPLES COURSE.

This paper focuses on different teaching methods to improve the teaching of economics courses in colleges and higher education. Although this paper draws on student questionnaires and letters from experienced teachers, it relies chiefly on true-false tests given to 32,000 students at eighty colleges since 1954. The comparisons today are confined to the 103 men's and 37 women's classes, in forty-four colleges, which took them both before and after the course. The mean grade of the 140 advanced from 54.1 to 62.3 percent, or from about twenty-seven to thirty-one out of fifty. This is not self-evidently poor, without standards to show what improvement ought to be, or that these particular questions reflect what the course should teach, but it is certainly not impressive. Of the forty-four colleges, two from the "Ivy League," though with only one class each, recorded an average gain of 31 percent of the possible improvement between their beginning scores and 100; five liberal arts colleges whose names are well known, with eight classes, a 21 percent gain; fourteen state universities, seventy-three classes, 18 percent; thirteen large private universities, twenty-nine classes, 16 percent; and ten colleges and small universities known mostly in their own states, twenty-eight classes, 13 percent. Averages in the South were in most cases lower than those elsewhere.