Economics: How to bridge the gap?

Kan Yin-kwan, Adela

I would like to thank all my panel teachers for every effort they put all these years and my every student’s hard-working and trusting.

In our school, there seemed to be a big learning gap in my subject (Economics) between junior and senior form in my first-few-year teaching. It is found that language was one of the important issues making such a gap. As our school is one of the Anglo-Chinese schools, Chinese Language plays a fundamental role in junior’s form learning and language learning build on the basis of the students’ mother tongue. Students of my subjects (Economics), who are using Chinese language as instruction and written media in junior level and without any knowledge in Economics, find a great difficulty to overcome this impression and lack self-confidence to use English as media in the HKCEE. In addition, heaps of notes, reading materials, textbooks, and new concepts and related current affairs really give them heart attack. Our passing percentage in the HKCEE and HKALE was below the average standard. It made us including our subject teachers and even our principal tried to find out the solution to help the students and ourselves to have a more effective and efficiency teaching and learning.

In 1996, our principle invited an experienced teacher to discuss our matter and share his opinion to us on our notes and teaching materials. At the same time, our subject teachers include myself tried all the efforts to equip ourselves and broaden our view such as further study in education and applying to be a marker.

Then we started from the beginning. We re-made our own notes and teaching materials, even now our notes are not the best but it is suitable for our present students. We shared our teaching ideas, teaching language and carried class visits when we were available.

And now I would like to focus on how we bridge the learning gap and make our students to build up an interest and self –confidence in studying Economics.

Some teachers are considering whether a consistent sequent-topic consolidation and evaluation assessment can stimulate student to build up the habit of revision, be confident and skilful in facing the external examination, and become used to reading extensively and deeply with wider interest. Therefore, I conduct an action research with the students enrolled in Economics classes at my school to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the methods.

General plan

The aim is to obtain a more efficient practice to bridge the learning gap between the junior form and senior form due to English language ability.

First Action step: Notes preparing

I try to prepare a more interesting but concise notes. Then I choose the important basic concepts, the relevant definition, equation and explanation as daily revision and testing materials.

After teaching every important concept, students are required to do revision and memorize all the definitions; equation and explanation of specified Economics concepts. In the beginning of each lesson, students are required to have 5-minute memorized dictation of economics concept. We believed that dictation could work as a stepping stone for students to master standard Economics jargons in writing and build up the self-confident themselves. If students can get our expectation level such as about 90% or above, I motivate my students by expressing due expectations of them, and build learning and teaching on their success (no matter it is small or big). There is both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which includes informal rewards such as verbal recognition of the top-ten students, stickers and small prizes given after their rewarding of 10 stickers on their dictation book.

Second Action step: Consolidation

We believe that understanding how the economic concepts (such as opportunity cost, integration) relate to their daily life and current issue (dating with different idols, Tom.com tries to take over ETV) can be treated as a means of solving problems. I can help students to move from being recipients of knowledge to seeing the relationships between ideas, applying ideas, and ultimately thinking critically and creatively and constructing knowledge by using the jargon they can master because understanding something is usually the best way of remembering it deeply. So when students are trying to make sure that they will remember something, they do not necessarily only engage in rote-memorization. They may be trying to understand and remember something at the same time.

My colleagues and I build up a bank of teaching material e.g. Current affairs to facilitate and change in responding to different demands and situations. This widens the exposure of students and helps them to learn in a changing environment.

When time was available, current social issue or relevant cases (such as proposal of GST, price war among supermarkets and tax on petroleum relate to the topic of demand and supply) will be structured as exercise or worksheet to suit their abilities. In order to develop their interest in Economics learning, and let them experience success, pride and confidence in having attained a goal through reasonable effort, students are required to express themselves openly and present their view and work in front of students. Therefore, they are not only at the memorization level, but also jump to generic skills level. They have the opportunity to speak Economics English properly, to appreciate the analytical power of Economics and to develop an interest in Economics learning. Individual progress and improvement would be recognized by verbal or written appraisal.

Final Action

Finally, to make sure the master level of student, to help higher-achieving students’ higher-order think skills and improve the quality and self-confidence of their think, a wide range level written test of each topic should be given. Individual progress, both weaknesses and improvement should be recognized. Appropriate feedback should be given so both teachers and students can recognize where to start again.

Discussion, reflecting and rethinking.

After the 1st term test, there was an evaluation. It reflected that half of students still do not have a satisfactory written test but most of them 70% are interested in studying Economics. 20% students do not have confidence in using English as media in HKCEE. Some teachers still don’t believe on-going evaluation will work.

Revised general plan

Normal teaching, dictation-evaluation, case study, oral presentation-evaluation and written test assessment are still carried on, IT such as PowerPoint are added as teaching aids on a number of topic. We believe the on-going evaluation and assessment can help student to grasp the Economics concepts effectively. It was found that both the internal and external results were improving.

After 1-year taking Economics, It was found that 80% of Form four students are interested in learning economics. 75% have self-confident in using English as media in HKCEE. 50% have confidant in mastering this Subject well. Most do not find PowerPoint help them much. Teachers in the panel believe an on-going assessment-evaluation can help students to build up self-confident and interest in this Subject.

I believe that we are still in the beginning to improve our teaching effectiveness and efficiency, many steps and efforts are needed to be put on.

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