Teach Economics: How Understanding Brain Science Can Help You Teach Economics

Scott Wolla: Hi. I’m Scott Wolla. Welcome to Teach Economics. This show is all about the power of bringing economics into the classroom, but it’s no secret that sometimes students struggle with the subject. So, let’s take a step back in this episode and learn a little bit more about how we learn, more specifically what happens in our brains when we learn or even think about something in an unfamiliar way.

Bill Goffe: I ask people to list the days of the week, very straightforward sort of thing to do, but if I ask them to alphabetize it, it’s quite hard.

Wolla: That’s Bill Goffe. He’s had a long and distinguished career as a teaching professor at Penn State University. He says understanding the science of how students learn meant doing something economists aren’t always known for, learning from other fields of study.

Goffe: For something that makes sense, monetary policy, but for learning a huge amount of useful work done in other disciplines that we can fruitfully use.

Wolla: Bill Goffe will be joined by Andrew Butler, an associate professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He tells us one of the best strategies for helping students learn economics, or any traditionally difficult subject, is simply explaining to students how you’ll be teaching.

Andrew Butler: Starting the sales pitch, if you will, to students at the very beginning of the semester, here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s some previous students’ experiences with this, is really powerful.

Wolla: On this episode, we connect the dots and explore what brain science can teach us about how to bring economics to life in the classroom.

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Wolla: From the St. Louis Fed, you’re listening to Teach Economics.

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Andrea Caceres-Santamaria: Hi. I’m Andrea Caceres-Santamaria, an economic education specialist at the St. Louis Fed. We know finding creative ways to engage your students can be a challenge. That’s why we created Page One Economics®. Each issue provides a short overview of a timely topic that offers students an opportunity to learn economics while using close reading strategies. You can find Page One Economics® at stlouisfed.org under Resources for Teachers and Students, and while you’re there, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Okay. Let’s get back to the show.

Wolla: We’re going to spend a lot of time in this episode exploring how brain science can bring economics to life in your classroom. One of the lessons we’ll learn is the power of story and how a good narrative fuels learning. For Bill Goffe, it was the combination of stories and math that drew him to study economics.

Goffe: While undergrad, I was first a math major, really enjoyed that, but wanted to pair it with something else. And for some reason, economics really appealed to me. You can do the math. I liked the stories is why. I very much liked that mixture of different things.

Wolla: Well, are there stories, do you remember, that were especially compelling as you were making those decisions?

Goffe: I think, in the background, this, I was in college, starting in 1977. It was a pretty tumultuous years macroeconomically. It turned out from 1970 to 1982 there are four recessions, high inflation, oil shocks, and that was in the background.

Wolla: You’ve also been a proponent of using research-based teaching strategies in economics. Can you explain a little bit by what you mean when you say things like researched-based or science of learning teaching strategies?

Goffe: Yes. Knowing how people learn and their cognitive restraints. For example, if I asked people to list the days of the week, very straightforward sort of thing to do, but if I ask them to alphabetize it, it’s quite hard. We have limited working memory of how many things we can process, three or four or five things depending upon what it is. Typical class, that is far exceeded. So, that’s one of the ideas of working with people’s cognitive architecture.

Wolla: That’s really fascinating. And I find a conversation with the two of you really great for this topic specifically. So, Andrew Butler, majored in economics as an undergrad—

Butler: Yes.

Wolla: …and now, like, is a cognitive science scientist and thinks deeply about how to teach and education theory and practice, and Bill, who’s a trained economist and later came to really dive into the science of learning. So, the two of you bring, kind of, both pieces to the table, the economic content and the understanding of the cognitive science. So, Bill, we’ll start with you. How did you first get involved in this area of science-based learning?

Goffe: Well, it was about 10 or 15 years ago. I was mid-career teaching SUNY Oswego, and some friends of mine, fellow economists Scott Simpkins, Mark Mayer, sent me an article by Carl Weiman titled, “Why Not Take a Scientific Approach to Science Teaching?” And he told the story. He was a Nobel laureate, and he had two puzzles. He didn’t understand how his graduate students came in his labs knowing virtually, he thought, and then they feared their peers. He wondered how this happened. A second question was he gave a great lecture and the students understood nothing. So, he was puzzled, so he did the scholarly thing of reading the appropriate literature on how people learn. And I thought that was charming or invigorating, where he had a puzzle. Rather complaining about students, he actually read the literature. As academics, that’s what we should do.

Wolla: So, of course, these teaching strategies can work across the curriculum in several disciplines, probably any discipline. But how do you think economics is well positioned for these types of methods?

Goffe: I think we could use these methods. We teach material that’s quite hard. If you look at surveys of students on what courses are hard, we rank pretty high up the list, challenging courses. Also, we’re not very amenable to things outside our discipline. We tend to be a rather imperialist social science. We go into other areas, but we’re not very amenable to areas coming into us. There’s a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Fourcade. I think it was in 2014, and we cite other social sciences the least of any other discipline. And for something that makes sense, monetary policy, but for learning, a huge amount of useful work done in  other disciplines that we can fruitfully use.

Wolla: Do you have any, like, working theories as to why economics is, you know, less likely to borrow from other fields?

Goffe: Oh, I think we explain the universe. I really don’t. I think disciplines develop norms. Yours probably has some. Mine has norms. Mine, for example, we really dislike meetings. My department has one meeting a year. It’s about an hour long, and every department I’ve been in, that’s the norm. We just dislike meetings, and I think there’s just odd traits. Maybe that’s not the best word, but different traits. Andy?

Butler: Well, if I could jump in here for a second. I think it’s not that unusual of disciplines, especially around teaching and learning, to be focused on the culture within their field. Right? And when I go around and interact folks in chemistry or biology – I do some medical education research, for example – there too. I mean, they want to see it done with their students in their discipline, right, before they’re ready to believe some of these things.

Wolla: So, have you found, like, effective methods for, you know, selling these methods to other disciplines that, maybe not resistant, but at the same time don’t come knocking on your door looking for it?

Butler: I think it’s first learning about the discipline and the culture of teaching and learning in that discipline, right, because as an outsider, you can’t come in and tell people what to do. The other thing, I think, is being very humble about the fact that there’s all kinds of great things going on within that culture already. Right? People are teaching really well. Right? Students know how to learn, and so, when you come in and say, “Well, you’re not doing anything right. Right? We know what to do,” that’s dead on arrival in terms of a message. So, part of it is, kind of, understanding what people do already, trying to label some of that and show, right, this is why what you’re doing is working can be really useful in, kind of, opening people’s minds to thinking about what else they could learn or what they are already doing that they could do better.

Wolla: That’s great. That’s wonderful. And, Bill, you teach, like, really large classes. How many students do you typically have?

Goffe: I generally have about a thousand a semester. I have three sections of about 330 students.

Wolla: Okay. So, how does that change the dynamics for using these methods?

Goffe: They work well in large classes. You have to modify them a bit. Let me explain a typical class where students read the textbook online. They mark it up with comments, questions. They come into class with some idea of the topics, and then, I ask challenging clicker questions, mainly conceptual ones. So, for example, students often times have trouble with the content of real GDP. So, I have them read about that. I come in and have a clicker question on how is real and nominal GDP different. They are, kind of, all over the map on the clicker question. I use iClicker software so I can see the responses, and I say, “Okay. Convince your neighbor of your answer.” And they can verse the right answer on the second vote, and then, I provide an explanation as well. There’s a paper by Michelle Smith. She’s a biology education researcher, and she found in that discipline that both instructor explanations and peer instruction lead to more learning than one of those things individually. I think it’s a bit like triangulation where you hear several different explanations that are mutually reinforcing. It helps you learn rather than just one answer.

Wolla: So, I’m sure, like, as a professor, you’re able to see, you know, a difference in your students’ performance. Do you think your students are aware of, like, these teaching methods? I’m just wondering about student reactions to that experience?

Goffe: They don’t come up very often to me. I think teaching a large class, they’re less likely to come up and talk to you, but I do notice in my student evaluations they say those things are useful. And I would add I use those comments at the start of the following semester to sell students to what I’m doing. Students come to a new class. I tell them how I’m going to teach it, and if you have a student’s voice to illustrate that, I think it’s quite helpful.

Wolla: And, Andy, I don’t know how much of the time you spend, like, teaching teachers. But do you have people in that environment saying, like, “Man, I wish my professors would have used these kind of strategies?”

Butler: Yeah. I mean, I think a big part of teaching with the science of learning is helping students to embrace the challenge that you present, the appropriate challenge, right, and helping them think about how their engagement and their persistence can help to overcome it. And so, Bill’s example of, you know, starting the sales pitch, if you will, right, to students at the very beginning of the semester – Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s some previous students’ experiences with this – it’s really powerful. And then, you have to keep that going, I think, throughout the semester, right, as you’re doing more things, messaging about why you’re doing them. And so, I see that. I mean, I see that in lots of different places, and professors do that in all kinds of different ways. Teachers do that in all kinds of different ways, but there are many spaces, like you were alluding to, right, where we don’t do that well and students recognize that. And they’re like, “Why am I doing what I’m doing in this class? It feels like torture.”

Goffe: And you’re paying money to be tortured.

Butler: Yeah. To be tortured. Yeah, exactly.

Wolla: So, Andy, you’re a chair and associate professor of education and associate professor of psychology in brain sciences at Washington University here in St. Louis. How did you first get involved in this area?

Butler: Which area? I mean, I feel like there’s so many areas here. I’m kidding.

Wolla:So, you were, what, psychology and economics as an undergrad?

Butler: Yeah. So, maybe—

Wolla:You—

Butler: …can I start with my econ journey—

Wolla: Yeah, yeah.

Butler: …just very briefly?

Wolla: For sure.

Butler: I mean, so, I really came to love economics in high school, and I took a course in my senior year that was really about taking economic principles and applying them in different contexts and seeing how they work. Right? Because they don’t work the same, right, in every context, and I really enjoyed that kind of way of thinking about things. I got to college, and there, I thought I wanted to be a businessman. So, I, you know, keep continuing on and persisting with economics, but a lot of the economics classes I took were really, kind of, plug and chug. Right? Here’s a formula. You put things in here. The best class I took in econ in college was an environmental economics class, which was really, again, about thinking, right, deeply about economic principles and how you implement them in different situations.

But at the same time, I, kind of, started taking some psychology classes and really fell in love with that discipline as a way to think about other people, to think about myself, and I had an experience the summer, or a set of experiences in the summer after my sophomore year where I went and worked in the stock brokerage, which is very interesting, and then I went on a summer abroad trip with some psychology faculty where they were going into schools and collecting data for their research. Right? And then, we were going back and taking courses and analyzing the data, and I just juxtaposed those two experiences. And even though I really, I enjoyed working in the stock brokerage, I loved the autonomy and the lifelong learning that came with doing research and I loved psychology. Then, in my junior year, first fall, I took a course on memory and learning, and that was it. I just found, like, I was like, “This is what I love.”

And I what I learned as I continued on and then went to graduate school is I could actually return to that same idea of taking these principles and thinking about how they work in different contexts, and it was, obviously, a different set of principles here. Right? We’re thinking about the science of learning and the things that we would want to use in education, but also other applied contexts. And what’s neat is that, yeah, those things too don’t just magically work when you drop them into different contexts. You have to think about how you’re implementing them, and that’s really fun and fun to come around and talk about them within economics, talk about them within biology, other kinds of spaces.

Wolla: So, when you meet someone, a professor or teacher, who is not accustomed to using these strategies, like, how do you pitch it? Like, what’s the best way to talk to educators about these strategies?

Butler: It’s hard. I mean, it really depends on the nature of that person, their experiences, their motivations, et cetera, right, because really this is a process of behavioral change, right, I mean, fundamentally. And there are lots of other spaces that we try to engage people in behavioral change, and we know, I mean, one thing we clearly know is that knowledge is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for behavioral change. Right? So, first step is, you know, maybe, right, helping them to acquire some knowledge, but there’s a lot of literature that suggests that professional development with teachers, just generally speaking, often times gives teachers knowledge, but doesn’t necessarily change their practice. Right? And so, I think, there, part of working with people is trying to work toward sustained change, right, and helping people to change their pedagogy because it’s not easy. Right? You encounter difficulties when, you know, the first time you want to try retrieval practice in your class. Right? Because you’ve mostly been doing lectures and tests, and so, I’m going to try doing clicker questions. It may not go right, right? And sometimes, you can figure that kind of thing out for yourself, but it helps to also have somebody who’s coaching you through that.

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Wolla:We’re taking a quick break, but when we come back, Professors Goffe and Butler unpack practical ways you can bring brain science into your classroom. Stay tuned for that and a lot more.

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Mike Kaiman: I’m Mike Kaiman, an economic education specialist here at the St. Louis Fed. If you’re anything like me, this conversation has you feeling pretty excited about the idea of bringing more econ into your classroom. That’s why we created Page One Economics®. Each issue covers a current economic topic explaining key concepts without the jargon. Your students will see the economics behind the headlines without having to feel like they need to be an economist to understand it. You can find Page One Economics® at stlouisfed.org under Resources for Teachers and Students. And while you’re at it, subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll keep you up to date on new resources and upcoming events. Thanks for all that you do to enrich the lives of your students. All right. Let’s get back to this awesome conversation.

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Wolla: Before the break, Andrew Butler, an associate professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was explaining how learning is related to the process of behavioral change, and just like any other change, learning to teach with brain science principles can require a little trial and error. But I couldn’t help but ask him: Are science of learning practices really all that different from other teaching methods?

Butler: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think it, kind of, depends. There’s lots of things that people talk about as pedagogical practices. Right? And some of them, like for example lecturing at students, right, have long traditions and can be useful in some ways, right, but ultimately have some limited utility in the sense that we need to get some information in, but then it’s really about students’ ability to get that information out, right, and to demonstrate their learning to practice with things. And so, I think that, the science of learning really, one of the things it tells us about is how to adjust that balance, right, how to think about learning as a longer process, right, one in which we need to potentially introduce different types of activities with students, think about how we structure learning. So, it gives us a bigger frame, I think to talk about that process of learning, one that is rooted in our understanding of cognition, as Bill was talking about earlier.

But I think, I also want to say that a lot of pedagogical practices have the science of learning baked in already, right, in varying degrees. And so, again, part of that is recognizing what people already do that is good. Right? A lot of people are engaging students with, in retrieval practice, for example, but they may not think about it like that. Right? And so, I do think that part of introducing people to the science of learning or helping them deepen their knowledge about it is helping them recognize the things that they already do that are in alignment with that kind of way of teaching and then thinking about how, you know, they could be more effective in doing that.

Goffe: Giving them a framework to think about what they’ve already been doing.

Butler: Yeah.

Goffe:And then, they see it in greater detail and lightbulbs go off and so forth.

Wolla: So, we’ve been talking a lot about the science of learning and research-based teaching methods, and, you know, maybe we should take a step back and talk about, like, for a teacher who’s teaching in the classroom, what are some concrete, like, practical applications that they could take into the classroom that would, that are representative of this idea.

Butler: I think, to me, one of the first things to think about, if we’re going, kind of, maybe do it a little chronological from, like, the start of teaching a course, right, to the end, if you will, is to know your students. I think there’s nothing more important than to understand who your students are, what their goals are, what their beliefs, you know, their experiences that they are bringing into the classroom. And that helps, right, because one of the things that you see that is a very basic application from the science of learning is that we need to build on prior knowledge and we need to surface that. Right? And so, some of that is understanding what your students know coming into the classroom and the kinds of things that you can use as connectors, right, as they build knowledge. It also helps with the motivation piece and other aspects that are critical to learning because you understand some of the buttons to push, right, to help them engage and persist in the kinds of learning experiences that you’re standing up for them. Do you want to—Should we go back and forth?

Goffe: Sure. Yeah.

Butler:You can go next here and we’ll—

Goffe: Let’s see.

Butler: What else would you do?

Goffe: I would suggest that it’s not just tips, but understanding how people learn is a useful thing. It’s not best practices do this or that. I’ve seen several analogies on why these methods haven’t taken off. It’s because people see it as practice, and it’s, kind of, like a cook. You’re told how to cook something, but don’t really understand how to cook. And so, if you had someone who’s a naïve cook trying to cook a cake, it’s not going to turn out very well. So, if you have a sense of understanding how people learn, it helps a bit. One favorite one of mine is you remember what you think about. As Stan Willingham puts it, “Memory is residue of thought.” If you have people think hard about something, they’ll probably remember it. If you just talk to them, the chance of them remembering, it’s not great.

Butler: And—

Goffe: Does that even have a name to it, that principle that you’re—

Butler: Yeah. I mean, that is the part in parcel of everything that we remember in our lives. Right?

Goffe: Yeah. Yeah.

Butler: I mean, the things that we know best, the things that are best at our mental fingertips are the things that we practice using all the time. Right? And so, likewise, if you think about the development and acquisition of knowledge, but then also the maintenance over that over time, in the science of learning, one of the distinctions people make – and this, apologies, a little bit jargony, right – is the distinction between retrieval strength and storage strength. So, retrieval strength is about, kind of, the momentary accessibility of knowledge. Right? Can I get to it right now? Whereas, storage strength is about how durably it’s been stored in memory, if you will.

And you can think about questions that you could ask that would, kind of, illustrate the differences there. So, I might ask you, for example, what you ate for dinner last night, right, and that would be something that hopefully you would be able to have at your mental fingertips. So, that’s something that’s high in retrieval strength, but probably very low in storage strength. Right? Because unless you continue to practice that, if I asked you in a month, you wouldn’t remember it, I mean, unless you eat the same thing for dinner every night, which that’d be very boring. Right? There are other things which you have, you know, practice and learned very deeply, but may not be accessible at the moment. So, if I asked you what your kindergarten teacher’s name is, right, maybe you can get it if I gave it to you, right, you’d have it and it’d be back at your mental fingertips. But it may not be something that you can get to right now, but that’s something that you used for a whole year of your life, right, probably more than that. So, it’s deeply stored in memory. You just can’t get to it at the moment. And you can, right, you can illustrate it in more ways, but that hopefully gives you a flavor.

So, we’re trying to think about how to increment that storage strength, right, and these principles from the science of learning are the things that do that. They also help with the accessibility of the retrieval strength part, but yeah.

Goffe: Yeah. Another thing is, when you’re teaching something, it’s best, in general in my understanding, is to put in relation something students already know. So, when I’m, for example, teaching GDP deflator, I couch in terms of real nominal GDP. I actually have an exercise, a table with real nominal GDP and ask what’s happening, and the answer turns out to be prices rising. And then, we go into the GDP deflator. Rather than giving a formula, this is what the deflator happens to be. So, we tend to know most things in terms of what we know with other things, as opposed to doing something—Like, one example might be if I’m talking to an economist, if I gave the people in the room something to read related to economics, they could read it deeply and understand it and remember it well. If I gave them medieval French literature, their recollection of it five minutes later would be very poor.

Butler: Yeah.

Goffe: And you need a framework, and partly as Andy said, you need to know what your students know before to help build that framework. And then, the class then should be, as much as possible, to be building that framework connecting to prior things they’ve done rather than just doing something new and fresh.

Wolla: Otherwise, I imagine it would be, like, handing me that French literature, right?

Goffe: Yes.

Wolla: Yeah. No. That’s really great. So, what’s the biggest misconception people have about these teaching strategies?

Butler: I’d say, I mean, I think one big one is that they will just magically work without trying to think about how you fit them and implement them within your context. Right? So, sometimes, you pick up a great book or an article, right, and it tells you about something, and, you know, it isn’t the case that you can always just go and magic, and do that and it’ll work, you know, wonderfully well in your classroom. Sometimes, you need to adjust it a little bit. And I do think that that’s where some of the deeper knowledge about how people learn helps you think about taking those things and putting them into context.

I love your analogy about, Bill, about thinking about creating chefs. Right? And, you know, I do think that people can be very effective at teaching if they are, right, the analogy would be a line order chef. Right? You know how to do this one thing well. Right? You can carry out this recipe and produce things with it. Right? And that’s great, but ultimately, it’d be great to have people have a little bit of that deeper knowledge because that helps them to riff on things. Right? Instead of just using this method and reeling off this recipe, right, I can change things up a little bit. Oh, I only have these ingredients right now. Oh, I can—Right? Or I want to make this different dish. That deeper knowledge, I think, helps people. So, I would urge people to, you know, if you’re starting out, right, try some of these things, but also think about acquiring some deeper knowledge just about how people learn in general because I think it’ll make you more effective in how you use some of these tools or tips or methods in your teaching.

Wolla: So, curious from both of you, what do you enjoy most about teaching?

Goffe: Crafting good questions that get to the heart of misunderstandings. So, I might be looking at an exam, talking in student office hours, realize—One example has come up I’ve not addressed yet. Students often confuse GDP deflator and real GDP. To me, those are entirely distinct things. The numbers are very different, 112 versus 27 billion, but students still confuse those. So, I wanted to craft a question on, to help them understand to make those things separate, distinct. So, that’s the fun part. Writing exams, not so much. That’s a skill. That’s a hard skill, but it’s not very enjoyable. I’ve yet to meet anyone who enjoys writing exams. If I do find that person, I’d love to find out why they do.

Butler: Yeah.

Goffe: Because they can transfer it to me.

Butler: That’s great. Well, I think that seeing students succeed really just fills you up, right, I mean especially if you’ve been putting them in places where you’re really challenging them, right, or you’ve seen them making errors, like you’re talking about, or having misconceptions in there. And just watching them grow beyond that, right, and the pride that comes with that is so powerful. So, I think that’s what keeps me coming back to teaching every semester, despite all these hard things that we deal with, and it really is the case that, you know, teaching over time, especially, and maintaining, you know, a particular standard and trying to be excellent, right, is difficult. And you’ve got to do some things to, kind of, keep yourself on your toes and to freshen things up. Otherwise, you know, you could get bored, and when you get bored, I think that’s not a good sign.

Wolla: And kind of a related question. So, as an educator, what experiences have been the most rewarding in your career?

Goffe: Why don’t you go?

Butler: I love when, you know, students come back and tell you about what a great time they’ve had. I was teaching a class the other day where we were talking about teachers and remembering teachers that have made a difference in your life, and, you know, the average student has, you know, four or five, six teachers that they can think about and were like, “Wow. That profoundly changed the way that I think about something or altered, you know, my path and my career,” other kinds of things. And it’s really neat to think about going back and telling those people about what a difference they made in your life, and sometimes, you know, in our roles, we get e-mails or sometimes students tell you things and you’ve just got to save those. Right? Because those are the best thing, the best thing. So, I save them and I, you know, pull them out occasionally when I need them. Yeah.

Goffe: For me, one thing I particularly enjoy is I do something called peer instruction, where I’ll pose a challenging clicker question. Maybe half the class gets it right and they vote 40-40-20, and I say, “Convince your neighbor of your answer.” And then, 40 percent more of the class gets it. So, it’s just the structure I set up. They were able to get to the right answer. So, that’s really enjoyable to watch them work with each other and then learn the material.

Wolla: That’s great. And imagine a new teacher or a teacher that’s learned these kind of teaching strategies. They’ve heard a little bit, just enough to pique their interest, and they come to each of you. And do you give them, like, one practical thing that they can go back to their classroom and do that’s easy to implement that they’ll have a great experience and probably see some results from students? Like, what kind of advice would you give that teacher?

Butler: You know, I think that we were talking earlier about principles of learning and, kind of, the ones that are maybe the highest leverage things, and I think retrieval practice is a big one. And it’s a big one for a number of reasons. Right? One is that, as students retrieve and think about, you know, retrieve knowledge and think about it and use it in different ways, right, that’s a powerful learning event in and of itself. We often times think about retrieval as being a neutral event, like stepping on a scale. Right? You step on a scale. It doesn’t change how much you weigh. But retrieving information from memory changes memory, right, and creates more durable memories. It can also, over time, if you’re working with information in different ways, change the way that you’re representing that information in memory. And that’s really, kind of, the development of deeper understanding. Right?  So, to me, that’s a big one.

And one of the other, you know, sidebars of that or additional benefits is that they’re, it really makes learning visible, visible both to the student, but also to the teacher. And so, students can see, right, where they are in their learning and where they have gaps and how they might address that. Teachers can see where students are, and, I mean, just like Bill was saying a second ago with that analogy of seeing that tremendous growth in just a short period of time, that’s really important for a teacher, right, to be getting that feedback about where their students are.

Goffe: I would add one concept that’d be useful and you can teach very quickly, the curse of knowledge. We think differently about a topic than our students. So, economics is a crueler discipline in many ways. We think differently about the world, and our students think very differently than we do. And we don’t always appreciate that very much. There’s neat demos on the curse of knowledge where I’ve seen a whole room of 500 people split into two groups, and one-half the room tapped out the national anthem. And no one on the other half of the room could actually pick up what that song was, and you know something well, it’s hard to understand how someone doesn’t know it. One example that—And physics have a system called the force concept inventory, and they put students in an FMRI machine taking this exam.

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Wolla: You’ve been listening to our conversation with Bill Goffe, teaching professor at Penn State University, and Andrew Butler, an associate profession of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and of course, tell all your friends. I’m Scott Wolla, economic education officer at the St. Louis Fed. And from the St. Louis Fed, you’ve been listening to Teach Economics.

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