Australasian journal of Economics Education 13, Number 2, 2016/4… · Economics Student to Economics Tutor BOOK REVIEW The Heart of Teaching Economics: Peter Docherty Lessons from

Australasian Journal of Economics Education

Volume 13 Number 2 September 2016

ARTICLES

The Effectiveness of Ethics Training Alan Kovacevic

on the Development of Moral Gerhard Hambusch

Judgment in Finance Students David Michayluk

Gerhard Van de Venter

Reflections on the Transition from Alison Lim

Economics Student to Economics

Tutor

BOOK REVIEW

The Heart of Teaching Economics: Peter Docherty

Lessons from Leading Minds

Simon W. Bowmaker

ISSN 1448-448 X

Editorial Executive Co-Editor Professor Rod O’Donnell Telephone: (+61 2) 9514 7738 Email: [email protected] Co-Editor Dr Peter Docherty Telephone: (+61 2) 9514 7780 Email: [email protected] Co-Editor Mr Joseph Macri Telephone: (+61 2) 9850 6069 Email: [email protected]

Editorial Board Professor William J. Baumol, New York University, USA. Professor Harry Bloch, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. Professor Bruce Chapman, Australian National University. Professor Kenneth Clements, University of Western Australia. Professor David Colander, Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. Professor John Foster, University of Queensland, Australia. Professor Andrew Hannan, University of Plymouth, UK. Professor Yujiro Hayami, Foundation for Advanced Studies in

International Development, Japan. Professor Tim Hazledine, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Professor K.L. Krishna, Delhi School of Economics, India. Professor Alan Luke, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Rod O’Donnell, Macquarie University, Australia. Professor David Round, University of South Australia. Professor Daniel Rubinfeld, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Professor Warren Samuels, Michigan State University, USA. Professor Amartya Sen, Harvard University, USA. Professor John Siegfried, Vanderbilt University, USA. Professor Jim Taylor, University of Lancaster, UK.

Secondary School Teaching Representatives Mr Doug Cave, Queensland Economics Teachers Association. Mr Ian Searle, Brisbane Boys Grammar.

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS EDUCATION

MISSION STATEMENT The Australasian Journal of Economics Education is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes papers on all aspects of economics education. With a view to fostering scholarship in the teaching and learning of economics, it provides a forum for publishing high quality papers and seeks to bring the results to a widening audience. Given both the increasing diversity of the student clientele, and increasing calls for greater attention to the quality of tertiary teaching, this Journal seeks to foster debate on such issues as teaching techniques, innovations in the teaching of economics, student responses to such teaching, and the incentive systems which influence the academic teaching environment. The AJEE is interested in research involving both quantitative and qualitative analyses and also in interpretative analyses based on case studies. While the Journal is Australasian-focussed, it encourages contributions from other countries in order to promote an international perspective on the issues that confront the economics discipline. AJEE aspires to: 1. Report research on the teaching of economics, and cultivate heightened interest in the teaching of economics and the scholarship of teaching. Pedagogical issues will be a central feature, and will encompass work on the teaching of economics in diverse contexts, including large and small classes, undergraduate and postgraduate classes, distance learning, issues confronting foreign students on-shore and off-shore, and issues related to the teaching of fee-paying MBA and other post-graduate groups from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Though economics is the prime focus, consideration will also be given to work on other subjects that have a demonstrated relevance for the teaching of economics. Such issues will also involve evolutionary issues in the teaching of economics, in terms both of effective ways to teach evolving theory and of evolving technology with which to teach that theory (including on-line teaching). Recognition will be given to the fact that economics as a discipline has not fared well in CEQ results (course experience questionnaire

results) since the reporting of those results began in Australia. Nor has economics teaching typically been well received in the USA or UK, according to survey evidence. In that context the relevance to teaching of changing administrative arrangements in universities will also be highlighted (eg in terms of contemporary quality assurance procedures and other government policy changes in Australia and New Zealand). 2. Report research on the nexus between teaching and research (including research on the diverse, changing and potentially conflicting incentives within the academic industry). Papers exploring the extent to which research and teaching activities are complementary or competitive will be welcomed. 3. Recognise the relevance of some more deep-seated implicit assumptions and issues of economic philosophy embedded in what is commonly taught, (as in Sen’s work on economics and ethics, for example). Inter alia, the question arises as to the way in which students respond to economics taught as a path to scientific certainty, as against economics taught as reflecting unsettled debate and vigorous controversy. 4. Recognise the place of history in the teaching of economics. Both HET and economic history tend to play a diminishing role in professional economics training, as emphasis on technique dominates. This a-historical approach to the teaching of economics has been criticised by many influential economists (including Joan Robinson, Leontief, Myrdal, Colander, and Robert Clower in his acerbic remarks about the value of much that is published in such prestigious journals as the AER). This line of criticism has been continued in the recent growth of heterodox economics associations in a number of countries (including one for Australia and New Zealand) and on the web through the Post Autistic Economics (PAE) newsletter. Historical and institutional factors will thus provide one focal interest. 5. Recognise interdisciplinary issues important to the presentation of economics in various contexts. On the one hand, economics students are not systematically exposed to the insights of other social sciences and the conformity or otherwise of their conclusions with those of economics. On the other hand, other disciplines within the social sciences and humanities (e.g. the Social Work profession) do not always include even an introduction to economics for their students, notwithstanding that economic issues are often very important

determinants of the environment within which they operate. More fundamentally, questions arise as to whether social science is more than the sum of its respective parts, and as to whether the roots of economics can be fully understood in isolation from the history not only of economics but also of politics and philosophy. 6. Establish a link to the teaching of economics in the secondary schools, given that tertiary enrolments in economics reflect fluctuating enrolments in economics in the secondary schools. 7. Encourage on-going surveys of student response to the teaching of economics across Australasian (and other) institutions, including response to experimental teaching and to differences between institutional approaches. (c.f. Colander and Klamer’s 1988 survey of economics students at USA ivy league institutions.) 8. Monitor trends in the teaching of economics both globally and in the Australian and New Zealand university systems (such as enrolments, staff-student ratios, international-domestic student ratios, offshore offerings etc), and the implications of those trends for various funding arrangements. 9. Promote a series of papers on specialised themes within the overall province of the teaching of economics e.g. on the teaching of Principles courses, the teaching of History of Economic Thought, the teaching of intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics, the teaching of development economics, and likewise regarding teaching in such streams as Quantitative Methods, large first year classes, non-English speaking background students, the teaching of economics to non-economists, product differentiation in teaching economics, and professional education in economics in executive education programs outside conventional university contexts. 10. Monitor the measuring and rewarding of quality (economics) teaching within Australasian universities.

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF

ECONOMICS EDUCATION

Volume 13, Number 2

September, 2016

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

The Effectiveness of Ethics Training

on the Development of Moral

Judgment in Finance Students

Alan Kovacevic

Gerhard Hambusch

David Michayluk

Gerhard Van de Venter

1

Reflections on the Transition from

Economics Student to Economics

Tutor

Alison Lim

32

BOOK REVIEW

The Heart of Teaching Economics:

Lessons from Leading Minds

Simon W. Bowmaker

Peter Docherty

52


Volume 13, Number 2, 2016, pp.1-31

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ETHICS TRAINING

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL

JUDGMENT IN FINANCE STUDENTS*

Alan Kovacevic, Gerhard Hambusch,

David Michayluk & Gerhard Van de Venter

University of Technology, Sydney

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the effects of a freestanding ethics course in a university

finance curriculum on the moral development of students. While a number of

studies have examined the effects of such educational initiatives on business and

accounting students, very few studies have focused on the finance discipline. A

Modified Defining Issues Test (MDIT) was thus developed and used in a test-retest

methodology to examine whether students in the Ethics in Finance course at the

UTS Business School possessed enhanced moral development after taking the

course. We find evidence of a statistically significant improvement in moral

reasoning understood from a Kohlbergian perspective. This effect was, however,

more pronounced in males than females with females beginning from a higher base

of moral development and improving only slightly. While a number of suggestions

are made for future research that might improve on the work reported in this paper,

our results justify the inclusion of separate and well-designed ethics courses in

finance curricula.

Keywords: ethics, moral development, curriculum design.

JEL classifications: A13, A22.

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the last couple of decades, public opinion about ethics in business,

and finance in particular, has been at best skeptical, but more often

* Correspondence: Gerhard Van de Venter, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box

123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia, Phone: +61 2 9514 7783I E-mail:

[email protected]. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for

comments. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.

ISSN 1448-4498 © 2016 Australasian Journal of Economics Education

mailto:[email protected]

2 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter

critical and pessimistic, sometimes regarding the idea of ethics in

business as nothing more than a humorous contradiction. The main

reason for this is not hard to identify. Major financial scandals at firms

such as Enron and WorldCom, with large sums of money

misappropriated by individuals or small groups of conspirators, Bernie

Madoff’s defrauding of clients through a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, and

the more recent LIBOR scandal of 2012, have all undermined public

confidence in the ethics of business people and financiers. These events

have not only triggered legislative changes around the world but they

have also accelerated discussion about the necessity for ethics training

in business education. In response to this, ethics training has been

introduced into virtually all business school programs, either as separate

courses or as integrated material in existing courses.

The question, however, is whether the inclusion of ethics into

business school programs has any effect on the development of

students’ moral judgment, on the nature of their decision-making

processes, and on their behaviour after graduation. Over the past three

decades, numerous studies have assessed the effectiveness of discrete

ethics courses in promoting moral reasoning in students (Boyd 1982;

Welton et al. 1994; LaGrone et al. 1996; Dellaportas 2006; Cagle &

Baucus 2006; Rutherford et al. 2012) with mixed results. Some

evidence clearly suggests that the typical curriculum fails to lead

students to higher-end ethical standards. Kumar et al. (1991) and Wolfe

(1993), for example, find that ethics courses have little effect and are

demoralizing for instructors who hope to equip students with the ethical

integrity necessary to meet the challenges they will face after

graduation. But other studies report contrary findings, and these mixed

results suggest that the effectiveness of ethics courses is still up for

debate. In addition, few studies have focused on the finance discipline

in particular. Given that one might expect finance students to be among

the most susceptible to moral temptation and the most likely to face

ethical dilemmas when they graduate, their ethical dispositions and

development should be an important area for research. This paper

examines, therefore, the impact of including ethics in a university

finance curriculum and whether such inclusion is effective for the moral

development of finance students. We find that participants in a discrete

course in ethics showed signs of significantly enhanced ethical

decision-making. These positive effects are, however, more strongly

observed in males than females.

Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 3

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews

the literature dealing with the effect of moral development training on

students in business, finance and accounting, and considers the theory

of cognitive moral development as defined by Kohlberg (1958, 1969).

Section 3 outlines the methodological approach taken in the present

study and describes the course in financial ethics around which the

study was built. Section 4 describes the data and reports our results

while Section 5 reflects on the study’s limitations and proposes avenues

for future research. Section 6 summarises and concludes.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

A key requirement for effectively improving the ethical awareness of

finance students is an understanding of the dynamics of moral

development in humans at a more general level. One approach to this

might be to draw upon insights from the field of psychology and

educational psychology that perceive moral development in terms of

changes that occur in an individual’s growth through adolescence to

adulthood. The theory of cognitive moral development (CMD) thus

examines how changes in individuals’ belief systems occur and how

these changes affect evaluations of ethical phenomena and the

generation of solutions to ethical problems.

The foundations of CMD lie in Jean Piaget’s (1932) seminal study of

moral development in children. Kohlberg (1958, 1969) built on this

early work of Piaget with longitudinal research on young adults that

attempted to break this overall development down into more precise

stages. He identified three broad levels of this moral development: pre-

conventional, conventional and post-conventional. At the pre-

conventional level, an individual’s concern is completely egocentric

and moral judgments are based purely on direct consequences. At the

conventional level, the morality of actions is judged by comparing them

to society’s views and expectations of what is right and wrong which

are rarely questioned. At the post-conventional or principled level, an

individual’s own moral perspective may be developed and may take

precedence over that of society.

Kohlberg further breaks each of these levels into component stages.

He breaks the pre-conditional level into Stage 1, where individuals

comply solely with rules and regulations when direct personal

consequences can be avoided, and Stage 2, where the concern is more

focused on actions associated with whatever the individual believes to

be in their best interest. The conventional level is broken into Stage 3,


where the willingness to uphold rules and authority is shaped by an

individual’s desire for the approval of his or her peers and superiors,

and Stage 4, where an individual is orientated towards following rules

and obeying authority in the hope of avoiding the breakdown of social

order. The post-conventional level is broken down into Stage 5, where

laws are regarded as social contracts as opposed to rigid regulations,

and Stage 6, where the determination of what is "right" is based upon

individually developed ethical principles such as, equality, justice and

respect for human rights. Table 1 provides a schematic version of

Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. This model provides a

hierarchical continuum of cognitive moral development with

movement from a lower stage to a higher one being associated with a

higher level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg’s conception. By

elaborating on the specific cognitive developmental approach followed

by Piaget, Kohlberg established a new method of assessing moral

judgment, which has contributed to the expansion of ethical research

programs. It has also allowed the direct application of CMD theory to

ethical education through Kohlberg’s involvement in teacher training,

curriculum implementation and evaluation measures.

Table 1: Kohlberg’s Six Stages of Moral Development

Pre-Conventional Stages

Stage 1 Punishment & Obedience

Stage 2 Self-Interest

Conventional Stages

Stage 3 Conformity and Interpersonal Accord

Stage 4 Authority and Social Order

Post-Conventional Stages

Stage 5 Social Contract

Stage 6 Universal Ethical Principle


Kohlberg (1971) argues that development through the six stages is

invariant, such that development does not occur for example, directly

from stage 2 to stage 4; rather the advancement is gradual and

chronological. Additionally, there is no guarantee of continual

development, as progress may be stopped at any time. It is believed that

development beyond stage 4 (into the post-conventional level) requires

exposure to diverse external factors (cf. Weber 1990) and rarely occurs

before an individual reaches their mid 20s. This leaves an optimal

timeframe for university students to be exposed to ethical intervention.

While Kohlberg’s approach is not without its critics, it provides a useful

framework for moral development that has been used extensively in

studies that examine the ethics of university students and graduates.

Several approaches have traditionally been employed by researchers

to measure the kind of cognitive moral capacity considered by

Kohlberg. Kohlberg (1958) himself developed the Moral Judgment

Interview (MJI), a semi-structured interview instrument designed to test

moral judgment by assessing responses to a series of hypothetical moral

dilemmas. This approach was criticized, however, because of its time-

consuming nature, especially when used on large samples, and for the

largely subjective nature of individual moral development scores that

depend upon researchers’ interpretations of qualitative interview

responses, a problem compounded when multiple interviewers are

involved. An alternative is Rest’s (1979) Defining Issues Test (DIT)

which is a self-administered objective format questionnaire that

depends on responses to a set of hypothetical social dilemmas. The DIT

presents the subject with six dilemmas as follows:

1) Whether a man should steal a drug that will save the life of his

dying wife;

2) Whether a man should report to the authorities that he has sighted

an escaped prisoner, despite the prisoner leading an exemplary

life since escaping;

3) Whether a principal should halt the publication of a student

newspaper which has angered the community due to its political

ideology;

4) Whether a doctor should provide medicine to a terminally ill

patient who has requested it but whose death it may cause;

5) Whether a store manager should hire a minority member, who is

disfavoured by the store’s customers;

6) Whether students should protest the Vietnam War.


Each dilemma is followed by 12 “items of consideration” which

constitute potential aspects of dilemma resolution and which map onto

stages 2 to 6 of Kohlberg’s schema of moral development. The

participant is asked to rate each “item of consideration” in terms of how

critical it is to resolving the proposed ethical dilemma. Numerical

values are then attached to the subject’s ranking of these items and an

overall index is constructed which indicates how developed the moral

thinking embedded in these responses is in terms of Kohlberg’s stages.

A key feature of the DIT is then that it produces a single index figure,

called a Principled Score or P-score, that characterizes a subject’s

cognitive moral capacity. This index has been repeatedly validated over

the last four decades as consistently providing a better measure of moral

awareness than alternative measures (see Rest et al. 1997) and is,

therefore, the most widely used measure in studies that examine the

effectiveness of ethics training. It is also ideally suited for use when

large samples are involved (McGeorge 1975).

The DIT is, however, designed as a measure of general moral

development and may not be very useful for measuring moral responses

to the more specific ethical challenges that emerge in particular

professional contexts. Welton et al. (1994), therefore, developed and

validated the Accounting Defining Issues Test (ADIT) which adapts the

DIT for specific application to the field of accounting and is comprised

of two business and two accounting dilemmas rather than the general

dilemmas of Rest’s original instrument.

Frameworks such as that built around Kohlberg’s stages of moral

development, and tests derived from these frameworks such as Rest’s

and Welton’s versions of the DIT, have been used to measure and

examine the cognitive moral development of students in various

university departments over the last two decades. These studies have

examined the moral development of students in law (Hartwell 1995;

Landsman & McNeel 2002), dentistry (Bebeau & Thoma 1994; Chaves

2000), medicine (Self & Olivarez 1996) and veterinary medicine (Self

et al. 1993). Studies that directly analyze the effect of ethical education

on finance students are, however, rare, particularly those employing a

Kohlbergian theoretical framework or some version of Rest’s DIT

instrument.

The methodology of many of the studies identified above have

included a test-retest format to measure changes in participants’ moral

judgments as a result of exposure to ethics training. Students sit some


version of the DIT at the beginning of semester, take the ethics course,

and then sit the DIT again. Statistically significant changes in results

from the DIT are then interpreted as evidence of a positive effect from

the ethics course on moral development. Results from the studies listed

above have, however, been inconclusive. Martin (1982), Wolfe &

Fritzsche (1998), Venezia (2004), Waples et al. (2009) in particular find

evidence that ethics courses do not have positive effects on students’

ethical development. The reason for this is not so clear. Cragg (1997)

argues that by the time an individual reaches adolescence, the essential

factors that drive character development have already exerted their

influence and morals are largely formed so that teaching ethics to

university students has little effect. Kumar et al. (1991) supports this

finding. But many of the other studies listed above are consistent with

the proposition that moral development is not completed until later in

an individual’s life, leaving room for intervention during university

studies (see Boyd 1982; Welton et al. 1994; LaGrone et al. 1996;

Dellaportas 2006; Cagle & Baucus 2006; Nelson et al. 2012). Lau

(2010) reviews this literature and Table 2 summarizes his analysis.

Several studies have explored alternative methods of measuring

students’ moral capacity. Cole & Smith (1996), and more recently

Cagle & Baucus (2006), examine students’ ethical perceptions before

and after the introduction of ethical case studies into a finance

curriculum. These studies used a questionnaire adapted by Cole &

Smith (1995) from Froelich & Kottke’s (1991) earlier instrument which

asks students to respond to a series of ethical perceptions from the point

of view of both a typical business person and a more ethically-sensitive

business person. Both studies find that students who have studied the

ethical dimensions of scandal cases demonstrate enhanced ethical

decision-making compared to students who have not.

While the impact of ethics education on general business students has

been measured with a range of instruments, the study of ethics in

accounting has traditionally followed Kohlbergian theories and

measures developed by Rest (1979). Dellaportas (2006) reports on the

development of an ethics course that was presented over a period of 12

weeks. Dellaportas aimed to evaluate whether this course could raise

accounting students’ levels of moral reasoning measured with a test-

retest format based on a shorter three-dilemma version of the DIT.

Students’ P-scores in this study were, on average, significantly

increased as a result of the course.

Table 2: Development of Business Ethics Research, 1980 - 2010

Authors (year) Field Sample Analysis Instrument Measure Impact Findings

Boyd (1982) Business Treatment: 180

Control: 81

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Rest’s DIT P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’

moral reasoning and

development

Weber & Green

(1991)

Business Treatment: 61 Pre-test to

evaluate what

stage

sophomores,

never exposed to

ethics courses,

would evaluate at

Analysis of an

ethical dilemma

involving an

auditor (Roger

Worsham case)

Kohlbergian

Standard Issues

Scoring (SIS)

measure

Overwhelming majority

(77%) students

demonstrated reasoning

below stage 4

Welton et al.

(1994)

Accounting Treatment: 35

Control: 46

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Welton et al.

ADIT

P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’

moral reasoning and

development

Cole & Smith

(1996)

Business Treatment: 537

Students & 158

Business

People

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

“ethical”

responses

Froelich and

Kottke survey

Scale ranging

from 1 (strongly

agree) to 6

(strongly

disagree)

Students were more

accepting of

questionable ethical

responses compared to

business people

Abdolmohammadi

& Reeves (2000)

Accounting Hypothesis 1 -

Treatment: 113

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Rest’s DIT P-scores Low impact for female

students, moderate

impact for male

students.

8 A

. Ko

vacevic, G

. Ham

busch

, D. M

ichaylu

k & G

. Van

de V

enter

Table 2: Continued

Authors (year) Field Sample Analysis Instrument Measure Impact Findings

Thorne (2000) Accounting Treatment: 99

Comparison of

DIT and

accounting

specific

instrument

scores.

Rest’s DIT &

Thorne’s

accounting

specific

instrument

P-scores Validates two measures of

moral reasoning of

accountants: prescriptive

and deliberative reasoning

Dellaportas

(2006)

Accounting Treatment: 26 Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Three-dilemma

version of

Rest’s DIT

P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’ moral

reasoning and

development

Cagle & Baucus

(2006)

Business Treatment: 54

undergrad and

32 MBA

students

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

“ethical”

responses

Froelich and

Kottke survey

Scale ranging

from 1 (strongly

agree) to 6

(strongly

disagree)

Positive and significant

effect on students’ moral

reasoning and

development

Ritter (2006) Business Sample: 134

undergrads

Treatment: 33

Control 44

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

responses and

relative four-tier

scores

Smith and

Oakley’s

scenarios (Moral

awareness) and

Ethical vignettes

(moral

reasoning)

Scenarios using

6-point scale

(never to

always) and

four-tier scores

(from non to

highly ethical)

No impact on moral

awareness or moral

reasoning as a whole,

however slight positive

effects in women

Eth

ics Tra

inin

g a

nd

Mo

ral Ju

dgm

ent 9


Thorne (2000) employed and validated two separate measures of

accountants’ moral reasoning: prescriptive and deliberative.

Prescriptive reasoning involves what should ideally be done to resolve

an ethical issue while deliberative reasoning involves the intention to

act naturally on a particular ethical issue. Thorne validated these two

measures by comparing the results of accounting students that

completed Rest’s original DIT to those who completed Thorne’s own

context specific instrument. His results indicate that the context specific

instrument generates a more finely tuned measure of whether the ethics

course taught as part of the study was effective in influencing students’

moral development. Finally Welton et al. (1994) used treatment and

control groups to measure the effectiveness of a stand-alone ethics

course and found that students taking the course demonstrated

improved moral reasoning measured using an accounting specific

version of Rest’s DIT.

While not the central issue of this paper, there has also been an

increased focus in recent literature on gender-related issues in the

response of students to ethics training. More specifically, some studies

have examined whether males and females follow the same ethical

decision-making process and to what extent ethics intervention has a

differential effect on their moral development. Kohlberg’s moral stages

framework has come under significant scrutiny where critics, such as

Gilligan (1977, 1982), have argued for the existence of gender bias

within its structure. Gilligan (1977) reflects on how male social

development is characterised by individualism, while female

development is linked to interpersonal factors. It has also been argued

that women’s moral reasoning is driven by a ‘caring’ factor which

motivates decisions driven by others’ needs and an individual’s specific

relationships. This results in female responses not being evaluated

accurately in Kohlberg’s ‘justice’-oriented system which reflects a

largely male ethical perspective.

The literature has often identified gender-differences in the moral

responses of students to ethics intervention irrespective of whether

gender-sensitive measurement of moral development was used or

whether the study explicitly accounted for gender bias. In regards to the

inadequacy of Kohlberg’s stages framework in accurately reflecting

female moral reasoning, numerous studies have suggested that gender

differences in moral responses identify women as having superior moral

sensitivity. While some studies find no significant difference in the


levels of moral reasoning between males and females (see Rest 1986;

Dellaportas 2006), a number of studies find that females have higher P-

scores in comparison to males (see Walker 1984; Thoma 1986;

Ponemon & Gabhart 1990; Ruegger & King 1992; and Rest 1994).

Cragg (1997) reports a result, however, where females demonstrated

significantly higher levels of moral reasoning after exposure to an ethics

curriculum than males. He suggests the possibility that ethics training

is only absorbed by individuals with a mental framework that is

prepared to engage in the consideration of ethical strategies and

development of moral values. Ritter (2006) expands on this by claiming

that, with enough training, it is possible to create the correct ethical

framework for both genders that will be ready for ethical development.

There may also be differences in how males and females respond to

ethics interventions. Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000), for example,

find that male students significantly benefited from a targeted business

ethics course while females did not. Ritter (2006), on the other hand,

found that while careful implementation of an ethics initiative had

positive effects on student moral development, these effects were only

witnessed in women. Loe & Weeks (2000) conclude that both males

and females are positively influenced by ethics training. These

conclusions illustrate the contrasting findings in the literature

surrounding gender bias in ethical development, suggesting that any

contribution that clarifies the role that gender plays in this respect,

would be beneficial.

There is, in summary, a substantial literature on the effect of

incorporating ethics instruction into business school programs on the

moral development of students. This literature draws on the

foundational work of Kohlberg on human moral development which

provides a framework for understanding and measuring that

development. Kohlberg’s original instrument for testing moral

development has been modified and adapted to a number of new

contexts including studies of business and accounting students. Results

from these studies are mixed as to the effectiveness of incorporating

ethics studies into business school programs but a number of studies

suggest that moral development is enhanced by such measures. It would

also seem that there are differential effects on male and female students

with both a greater need for ethical instruction and a greater effect of

this instruction on male students. But results on this issue are, once

again, mixed. Little work has been done directly on finance students


despite the apparent importance of ethics in the finance industry. The

following section thus outlines the context and methodology of the

present study which seeks to fill this gap.

3. CONTEXT AND METHODOLOGY

The present study was based around an existing final-year

undergraduate course called Ethics in Finance taught within the

Finance major and sub-major of the Bachelor of Business degree

offered by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business

School. This course is delivered in a workshop format, where the aim

is to deepen students’ understanding of the major theories of ethics as a

basis for analysing and understanding ethical dilemmas in finance.

Rasche et al. (2013) criticize current ethics education as being limited

in its integration into specific business school disciplines such as

accounting and finance. The Ethics in Finance course is uniquely

positioned, in that it focuses on finance ethics, as opposed to general

business ethics. The subject covers ethical frameworks, case studies and

professional practice issues. By examining scandals that have shaken

public confidence in the ethics of financial markets, this course

demonstrates the importance of ethics in the operation of financial

institutions, in the personal conduct of finance professionals, and in its

potentially far reaching implications for the global economy. In

addition, the subject also covers the CFA Institute Standards of

Professional Conduct and related applications as a best practice

example of conduct rules in the finance industry.

Students in the Spring 2014 semester offering of Ethics in Finance

were asked to complete pre- and post-test versions of what we will call

a Modified Defining Issues Test (MDIT), an adaptation of Rest’s

original DIT using similar modification principles to those employed in

the development of Welton’s et al. (1994) Accounting DIT. A number

of studies have suggested that an abbreviated ethical questionnaire is

the most effective instrument to collect data on students’ moral attitudes

due to practical considerations such as time availability and participant

fatigue. Based on reliability data, Davison & Robbins (1978) find that

a shortened three-scenario DIT is as effective in evaluating cognitive

moral development as the original six-scenario DIT where group means

are the focus. Shortening of moral development questionnaires has

been done effectively in studies such as Welton et al. 1994,


Exhibit 1: The Heinz and the Drug Dilemma

In Europe a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug

that doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same

town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was

charging ten times what the drug cost to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged

$2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone

he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000, which is half

of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it

cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, “No, I discovered the drug and I’m

going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and began to think about breaking

into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.

Should Heinz steal the drug? (Check one):

Should steal it Can’t decide Should not steal it

IMPORTANCE:

Great Much Some Little No

1. Whether a community's laws are going to be upheld

2. Isn't it only natural for a loving husband to care so

much for his wife that he'd steal?

3. Is Heinz willing to risk getting shot as a burglar or

going to jail for the chance that stealing the drug might

help?

4. Whether Heinz is a professional wrestler, or has

considerable influence with professional wrestlers.

5. Whether Heinz is stealing for himself or doing this

solely to help someone else.

6. Whether the druggist's rights to his invention have to

be respected.

7. Whether the essence of living is more encompassing

than the termination of dying, socially and individually.

8. What values are going to be the basis for governing

how people act towards each other.

9. Whether the druggist is going to be allowed to hide

behind a worthless law, which only protects the rich

anyhow.

10. Whether the law in this case is getting in the way of

the most basic claim of any member of society.

11. Whether the druggist deserves to be robbed for being

so greedy and cruel.

12. Would stealing in such a case bring about more total

good for the whole society or not.

From the list of questions above, select the four most important:

Most important ________ Second most important ________

Third most important ________ Fourth most important ________


Thorne 2000 and Dellaportas 2006. The MDIT thus employs only three

scenarios specifically selected from the DIT and the ADIT: the

generalized and non-business specific ethical dilemma “Heinz and the

Drug”; and two business specific ethical dilemmas, “Bankruptcy” and

“Reimbursement”. The “Heinz and the Drug” case from the DIT which

introduces students to broad ethical issues was included to facilitate a

comparison with previous studies, while the other two cases use

concepts developed for accounting but relevant for finance. Exhibit 1

replicates information for the “Heinz and the Drug” dilemma and the

full test is provided in Appendix A.

The measurement of moral development obtained using the MDIT

was calculated in the same way as in both the DIT and ADIT and was

done in three steps. Under descriptions of each of the three dilemmas

are twelve statements/questions that identify potential factors that a

participant might bring to bear in making a judgment about the ethical

dilemma posed in the description. Each of these statements maps into

one of the six Kohlbergian stages of moral development. The

statements/questions for the “Heinz and the Drug” case are also shown

in Exhibit 1 and a mapping of the statements/questions for each of the

three dilemmas in the MDIT into the Kohlbergian stages is shown in

Table 3.

The first step in the measurement process was to ask participants to

rate, on a five-point Likert scale, the importance that each of the factors

in these statements or questions might play in their judgment about the

dilemma. This step, thus, required participants to think analytically

about the moral problem and identified a range of possible factors that

might feed into their thinking about a solution. The second step asked

participants to identify the four most important factors in their thinking

about the problem from the list of twelve, in descending order. The third

step involved assigning values or scores to these four factors. This can

be done in a variety of ways. For example, if the objective is to measure

the degree to which Kohlberg’s higher level or “post-conventional”

principles govern moral decision making, the identification of

Kohlberg’s Stage 5 or 6 principles as being among the four most

important factors can be assigned high values, and other principles,

lower values. In this case an index can be calculated that measures the

use of these higher level principles in the participant’s moral decision


Table 3: Mapping of Scenario Statements onto Kohlbergian Stages

Statement

Number

Heinz and the

Drug

Bankruptcy Reimbursement

1 Stage 4 Stage 3 Stage 3


3 Stage 2 N Stage 2

4 N Stage 3 Stage 4



7 N Stage 4 Stage 4





12 Stage 5 Stage 5 N

(N = Nonsense/Irrelevant Statement)

making. Alternatively if one wishes to measure to the degree to which

lower Kohlbergian principles are used in this process, high values can

be given to the identification of Stage 3 or 4 principles among a

participant’s four most important factors and the resulting index would

thus measure the degree to which these “conventional” principles affect

moral decision making. It is even possible for indicies to measure the

use of principles from an individual Kohlbergian stage.

To illustrate, we describe this process for the main P-score that

measures the role of Kohlberg’s Stage 5 and 6 or “post-conventional”

moral principles. The factor identified by the participant as “Most

Important” for one of the dilemmas is given a score of 4 if it is a

Kohlbergian Stage 5 or 6 factor as indicated by the mapping in Table 3,

and 0 otherwise. The “Second Most Important” factor is given a score

of 3 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement and 0 otherwise. The “Third Most

Important” factor is given a score of 2 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement

and 0 otherwise. And finally, the “Fourth Most Important Factor” is

given a score of 1 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement and 0 otherwise. The

maximum number of points that could thus be scored for each dilemma

is 10 summing to a maximum of 30 for all three cases. The actual score

obtained out of this possible maximum of 30 is divided by 0.3 to deliver

a per cent value and this constitutes the P-score for each participant in


each test. An example of a completed questionnaire is provided in

Appendix A and a fully worked example of the P-score calculation is

provided in Appendix B. A participant thus obtains a high P-score

constructed in this way if they make extensive use of advanced moral

reasoning factors defined in terms of Stages 5 and 6 in Kohlberg’s

framework and a low score if they make extensive use of lower level

factors. But it should be noted that if high values are assigned to earlier

stage principles, alternative measures of moral development are

obtained.

Students in the Ethics in Finance course thus completed the MDIT at

the beginning of semester and then again at the half-way point, six

weeks into the semester. Changes in their P-scores between these two

tests were then used to identify changes in moral reasoning skills and

attributed to the treatment associated with participation in the ethics

course. The timing of the pre- and post-tests in this study was largely

determined by the structure of the course. Since the course’s first six

weeks aim at raising awareness of ethical dilemmas and at fostering

responsible and sustainable decision-making in finance, the completion

of this first half of the semester is critically relevant for the ethical

development of students measured in the test. By comparison, the

subsequent study of the CFA Institute Standards of Professional

Conduct focuses on the successful application of knowledge developed

in the first half of the semester.

A number of commentators have argued that “dilemma familiarity”

may reduce the effectiveness of test-retest methodologies using this

kind of moral development measurement. Dilemma familiarity is where

students learn enough about the dilemmas posed in the first test to intuit

the “correct” or morally sensitive responses which they return in the

second test whether or not such responses are authentic. Rest (1979)

argues, however, that the effects of dilemma familiarity are negligible.

Davison & Robbins (1978) suggest that the effect of dilemma

familiarity is sensitive to the time intervals between tests and that an

interval of as little as three weeks is sufficient to nullify any familiarity

bias. The interval of six weeks in the present study clearly exceeds this

minimum.

As in the original moral development studies, several consistency and

reliability checks were conducted in our project. Consistency in

participant responses was checked by comparing Likert ratings of the

four “Most Important” statement/questions identified by a participant


for each dilemma. The five point Likert rating of the “Most Important”

statement was thus compared with that for the “Second Most

Important” statement. The two responses were regarded as consistent if

the first of these ratings was greater than or equal to the second, and

inconsistent if this condition was not satisfied. The five point rating of

the “Most Important” statement was then compared with that for the

“Third Most Important” statement and the same test for consistency

applied. This procedure was repeated for each statement pair within the

four most important statements identified by the participant for each

dilemma. In line with consistency checks in the original DIT (Rest

1979) and the ADIT (Welton et al. 1994) studies, if an inconsistency

was detected in more than one of the three scenarios, that participant’s

questionnaire was removed from the sample.

Reliability of the responses was tested by including at least one

irrelevant statement in the list of twelve that followed each scenario.

Four such statements were included across all three cases of the MDIT

and these are indicated in Table 3. Where one of these statements was

included among the four most important statements identified by a

participant for their overall decision in a particular case, reliability

“demerit” points were assigned to that participant: four points were

awarded where the statement was identified by the participant as “Most

Important”, three points where the statement was identified as “Second

Most Important”, two points for “Third Most Important” and one point

“Fourth Most Important”. This process was applied across all three

scenarios, summing the total points assigned, and dividing by 0.3 to

obtain a percentage value. If the resulting value was greater than or

equal to 20%, the participant’s responses were deemed not to be reliable

and the questionnaire was removed from the sample.

In addition to in-class testing, an identical online test was made

available to allow students that did not attend class on the day that the

test was conducted, to participate. A link to the online test was provided

by email, instructing students to complete the test before having any

exposure to the course and its content. For the post-test, an additional

link was provided to those students who had similarly not attended class

on the post-test day, allowing them too, to participate and maintaining

consistency in testing procedures.

Two hypotheses were tested using the P-scores calculated for each

participant from the pre- and post-instruments described above. In null

form, these were:


H1: Ethics training does not have a significant effect on P-scores.

H2: Cognitive development through ethics training is

independent of gender.

The first of these hypotheses expresses the question of central interest

in this paper. The second, while not a primary focus of the paper,

analyzes the role of gender on the effectiveness of the Ethics in Finance

course on moral development. As discussed above in the literature

review, previous studies have been mixed on whether ethics

intervention affects males and females differently. We hypothesized,

therefore, a notable gender bias in the effect of the Ethics in Finance

course on moral development and this is expressed in the formulation

of the second hypothesis above. The next section describes the data

collected from the methodology outlined in this section.

4. DATA AND RESULTS

As explained above, students completed the MDIT instrument twice

over a period of six weeks: at the beginning of semester (the pre-test);

and in the middle of semester (the post-test). A total of 41 out of 76

enrolled students attended and completed the physical version of the

pre-test, while an additional 27 students completed the online version

of the test before they took the Ethics in Finance course. This generated

an overall pre-test sample of 68 students, out of which the responses of

6 students failed the applied consistency and reliability checks

discussed above. With respect to post-test responses, 9 respondents

were lost across the semester due to attrition, leaving a final matched

sample of 53 questionnaires. The mean age of respondents in this final

useable sample was 22 years, with a male dominated gender distribution

of 66% (34% for females). Full-time students comprised 81% of the

sample. A control group was selected to address potential sample bias

and only a pre-test questionnaire was given to this group. The control

group included students completing a major or sub major in the

Bachelor of Business degree at UTS with a major in Finance, but who

had not taken the Ethics in Finance elective during their studies.

Demographic information for both groups is presented in Table 4. Table

5 outlines the distribution of the participants’ native languages.

Table 6 presents mean values for a range of P-scores constructed to

measure the influence of Kohlberg’s “pre-conventional”,

“conventional” and “post-conventional” principles, as well as the

influence of principles from individual Kohlbergian stages, for the main


sample of 53 Ethics in Finance students and the control group of 38

Bachelor of Business students. The table also presents P-scores from

the pre-test and post-test for the main sample with results for a matched

paired t-test on the change between the two.

Column 1 of Table 6 indicates that the mean pre-test, post-

conventional P-score was 28.30, compared to a mean pre-test P-score

for the control group of 27.72. These scores were not significantly

different from each other (p = 0.98, two-tailed test). Additionally, pre-

test scores for measures of the influence of Kohlberg’s “pre-

conventional” (stage 2) and “conventional” (stage 3 and 4) principles,

in both the experimental and control samples were found not to be

significantly different (p = 0.38 and 0.74, respectively). These scores

were also tested across a range of demographic sub-samples of the two

groups and for an α of 0.05, no significant differences were found on

the basis of gender, age, mode of study or native language. These results

suggest that the Ethics in Finance students were sufficiently

representative of the general Bachelor of Business cohort and that there

was no problem of bias in the formation of the main sample, consistent

with the results of Nelson et al. (2012).

Table 6 also provides some insight into the composition of principles

used by students in both the main and control samples, absent any ethics

course treatment, to analyse moral dilemmas in Finance. The P-scores

for main sample student use of “pre-conventional” and “conventional”

principles in the pre-test were 10.00% and 56.70% respectively. Use of

these principles by students in the control group were not significantly

different at 11.49% and 55.79% respectively. This compares with use

of “post-conventional” principles discussed above at 28.30% for

students in the main sample and 27.72% for students in the control

group. These results are consistent with Kohlberg’s (1984) argument

that the majority of individuals reason at the conventional level and

further moral development is only achieved after direct exposure to

diverse external factors such as an ethics course (cf. Weber 1990).

The key result reported in Table 6, however, is a mean increase in P-

score for the main sample between the pre- and post-test of 11.07

percentage points. This change was statistically significant at the 1%

level indicating rejection of the null for Hypothesis 1 and suggesting

that Ethics in Finance was effective in improving the moral

development of students who took the course. This finding is consistent

with broader results reported by Dellaportas (2006) that students


Table 4: Demographic Features of the Sample

Experimental

Group Control Group

Initial sample size 68 43

Failed consistency & reliability checks (6) (5)

Lost through attrition (9) -

Final student sample size 53 38

Average Age 22 21

Gender Distribution:

Female 18 (34%) 21 (55%)

Male 35 (66%) 17 (45%)

Mode of Study:

Full time 43 (81%) 33 (87%)

Part time 10 (19%) 5 (13%)

Table 5: Language Characteristics of the Sample

Native Language

Experimental

Number of

students

Native Language

Control

Number of

students

English 42 English 31

Chinese 2 Chinese 2

Vietnamese 2 Italian 1

Bengali 2 Bengali 1

Tamil 1 Sinhalese 1

Turkish 1 Mandarin 1

German 1 Cantonese 1

Hindi 1

Japanese 1

taking a business ethics course demonstrated an increase of 12.8

percentage points in a similar measure of moral development and

Welton et al. (1994) who report an increase of 6.4%. Table 6 also

provides a breakdown of this overall improvement in moral


Table 6: P-scores and Changes in P-scores

Pre-test

[1]

Post-test

[2]

Change

[3]

Prob change = 0

[4]

Pre-conventional (Stage 2)

Group mean scores

Experimental 10.00 6.60 (3.40) <0.01

Control 11.49

Probability of group

equality 0.38

Conventional

Group mean scores

Experimental

Stage 3 17.86 14.34 (3.52) 0.03

Stage 4 38.93 34.91 (4.02) 0.04

Combined 56.79 49.25 (7.54) <0.01

Control

Stage 3 20.88

Stage 4 34.91

Combined 55.79


equality 0.74

Post-conventional

Group mean scores

Experimental

Stage 5 22.07 31.19 9.12 <0.01

Stage 6 6.23 8.18 1.95 0.05

Combined 28.30 39.37 11.07 <0.01

Control

Stage 5 23.16

Stage 6 4.56

Combined 27.72


equality 0.98

development into the influence of Stage 5 and 6 principles with an

improvement of 9.12 percentage points (significant at the 1% level)

associated with Stage 5 principles and an improvement of 1.95


percentage points (significant at the 5% level) associated with Stage 6

principles.

Further insight into this result is provided by the reduced use students

made of Kohlberg’s “conventional” and “pre-conventional” principles

in their assessment of the three dilemmas. Table 5 indicates that

students reduced their combined use of Stage 3 and Stage 4 principles

by about 7.54% (statistically significant at the 1% level) with about half

of this effect attributable to each of these stages. Students also made

reduced use of Stage 2 principles by 3.4% (statistically significant at

the 1% level). Students in the main sample thus appear to have

substituted higher level moral reasoning principles for lower level

principles as a result of taking the Ethics in Finance course.

Table 7 breaks down pre- and post-test results for the main sample,

and changes in the key P-scores for this sample, by gender. It also

reports results for a one tailed, two-sample (male and female sub-

samples of the main sample) t-test, assuming unequal variances, as well

as a two tailed t-test for P-score differences between males and females.

Despite a higher pre-test P-score for females of 30.19, compared to that

for males of 26.38, this difference was not statistically significant.

Similarly, the difference between the male and female post-test score

was not statistically significant. However, the difference in differences

of pre-test and post-test scores for males and females (15.33 – 5.18 =

10.15) was statistically significant at the 10% level. This suggests that

gender does play a role in the effectiveness of ethics training on moral

development, at least in the case of the Ethics in Finance course and

this finding is in line with such literature as Ruegger & King (1992), Rest

(1994), Ritter (2006), and Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000). But the

reason for this result is important. Females appear to possess slightly

more developed moral awareness than males before being exposed to

ethics training and the effect of this training is that males catch up with

female moral awareness. This finding is consistent with results reported

by Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000) that improvement in the moral

development of male students attributed to an ethics course was

statistically significant at the 1% level with a P-score change of 15.33%.

We thus reject the null formulation of Hypothesis 2 and conclude that

gender does make a difference to the effectiveness of ethics training on

moral development with the effect on males being more significant than

the effect on females.


Table 7: Gender-based MDIT P-scores and Change in P-scores

Mean P-score Matched paired

t-test

Gender Pre-test [1] Post-test [2] Change [3] Probability

change = 0

Female 30.19 35.37 5.18 0.31

Male 26.38 41.71 15.33 < 0.01

Gender

significance 0.29 0.20 0.06

5. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

The present study has some limitations that future research could

attempt to overcome. Firstly, while Rest (1979) and Welton et al.

(1994) independently tested the validity of their instruments, no validity

tests were conducted on the MDIT. We thus relied on prior validation

of the instruments adapted to create the MDIT inherently assuming a

smooth transition between generalized ethical scenarios and context

specific scenarios. While we regarded this as a reasonable working

assumption, future work could formally test the validity of the MDIT.

It could also take into account the observation of Davison & Robbins

(1978) that as an index of overall moral development, the P-score has

been known to be insensitive to changes that occur in the lower stages

of moral development, as opposed to changes exclusively at Kohlberg’s

principled level.

Secondly, further consideration could be given in future work to the

conception of ethical education itself. Kohlberg’s model of moral

development focuses entirely on cognitive processes and while it can

be assumed that there is some relationship between thought and action,

financial economists tend to focus on action alone. Thus further thought

could be given to the effect that ethics education might have on

behaviour directly. This may well be a ripe field of research for

experimental economics and finance.

Thirdly, the literature has shown that while ethics education does

promote the development of moral reasoning in students, the impact can

be short-lived and more finely attuned moral development can dissipate

after graduation (Lampe & Finn 1994; and LaGrone et al. 1996). As

new graduates are confronted with real ethical scenarios and external


factors such as hierarchical pressures, work place environments and the

influence of peers, they might find that their moral views change and

this is likely to impact on their ethical decision-making. Further

research might, therefore, be focused around longitudinal studies that

track the moral development of graduates from courses such as Ethics

in Finance, to see whether there are further changes in their ethical

decision-making processes after a number of years in professional

business environments. Although a number of studies have attempted

this (see Abdolmohammadi & Reeves 2000; Williams & Dewett 2005;

and Welton & Guffey 2009), mixed results have been reported and this

question would benefit from further research.

6. CONCLUSION

This paper has reported on the effects of a freestanding ethics course in

a university finance curriculum on the moral development of students.

While a number of studies have examined the effects of such

educational initiatives on business and accounting students, very few

studies have focused on the finance discipline. A Modified Defining

Issues Test (MDIT) was thus developed and used in a test-retest

methodology to examine whether students in the Ethics in Finance

course at the UTS Business School possessed enhanced moral

development after taking the course. We find evidence of a statistically

significant improvement in moral reasoning understood from a

Kohlbergian perspective. This effect was, however, more pronounced

in males than females with females beginning from a higher base of

moral development and improving only slightly. While a number of

suggestions are made for future research that might improve on the

work reported in this paper, our results justify the inclusion of separate

and well-designed ethics courses in finance curricula.


APPENDIX A: EXAMPLE OF COMPLETED QUESTIONAIRE




APPENDIX B: CALCULATION OF P-SCORE FOR COMPLETED

QUESTIONNAIRE

Scenario Ranking Score

Heinz and the drug Second most important (Statement 10) 3 points

Third most important (Statement 12) 2 points

Bankruptcy Most important (Statement 6) 4 points

Reimbursement Third most important (Statement 5) 2 points

Fourth most important (Statement 6) 1 points

Total 12 points

P-score for student = 12/0.30 = 40%

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REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANSITION FROM

ECONOMICS STUDENT TO ECONOMICS TUTOR*

Alison Lim

University of Technology Sydney

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the transition from economics student to economics tutor. It

takes a case study approach by examining the experience of a single tutor. The

transition is examined in terms of the interaction between two factors: the first is a

knowledge management factor that incorporates the knowledge demands

associated with teaching and the psychology associated with the transformation

from student into “expert”; the second is a pedagogical factor which requires the

new tutor to recognise that instruction is about helping students to acquire

economic knowledge and not simply about being a knowledge expert in their eyes.

While the particular transition described in this paper involved balancing these two

factors, the tutor’s prior experience as a student partly shaped the transition in

positive ways. Firstly, the experience of being a student helped the tutor to identify

core ideas in new topics for her own students and to develop explanations of those

ideas that enabled her students to learn more effectively. Secondly, the student

experience shaped the tutor’s commitment to using real world examples in her

teaching and this seems to have motivated students. Thirdly, the student experience

of engagement with teachers, fellow students and content material directed the

tutor to design teaching activities that more actively engaged students. One way to

view this transition is in terms of Bell et al.’s (2010) idea that critical reflection on

one’s own practice can lead to enhanced teaching outcomes. The paper concludes

with some dos and don’ts for new tutors based on this critical reflection on the

transition process.

Keywords: tutorial staff, teaching practice, critical reflection.

JEL classifications: A22

* Correspondence: Alison Lim, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123,

Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia, E-mail: [email protected]. The author would

like to thank two referees for comments and the editor for extensive help expressing her

ideas more clearly. Any remaining errors are the author’s responsibility.

ISSN 1448-4498 © 2016 Australasian Journal of Economics Education

The Transition from Student to Tutor 33

1. INTRODUCTION

A long standing theme in the economics education literature has been

the emphasis that economics departments place on research relative to

teaching, and the negative impact this can have on teaching quality (see,

for example, Butler et al. 1994; Becker 1997; Guest & Duhs 2002; and

Colander & McGoldrick 2009). This effect can be exacerbated when

universities employ doctoral students as tutors since doctoral programs

tend not to emphasise the development of teaching skills. It is also

common in the Australian context for honours students to be employed

as casual tutors while they complete their honours year or after

graduating while they contemplate the possibility of graduate school.

Honours students tend to share a lack of teaching preparation with their

graduate student counterparts, and both groups must largely rely on

their own experience as students to inform their teaching.

But this lack of teaching preparation highlights a phenomenon that

does not seem to have been very widely discussed in the higher

education literature. This is the fact that new teachers must make a

transition from being on one side of the classroom to being on the other,

and this transition may have positive as well as negative elements. That

is, there may be some aspects of being a student that it is important and

useful to change in order to be an effective teacher and new skills must

be learned even without teaching preparation. But there may also be

some aspects of being a recent student that are useful for the new

challenge of teaching and these may enhance a teacher’s effectiveness

compared with their similarly untrained but slightly more experienced

colleagues. It may thus be useful to reflect on the nature of this

transition and to ask whether there are lessons to be drawn from it, either

for pedagogical research or for departmental or university policies

designed to improve the effectiveness of newly appointed teachers in

economics, or other any other field.

The objective of this paper is, therefore, to reflect on the nature of

this transition. The paper is deliberately subjective and represents the

experience of only a single novice teacher. But economics has made

extensive use of the concept of the “representative agent” and since the

purpose is to identify issues for further reflection and research it seems

a reasonable approach.

The paper is set out as follows. Some relevant literature is reviewed

in Section 2. Section 3 then outlines and reflects on some key aspects

of the author’s experience of being an economics student. Section 4

34 A. Lim

then describes her transition from student to tutor, and Section 5 reflects

on this transition, suggesting some questions for pedagogical research.

Section 6 attempts to draw some more immediate practical benefit from

the earlier reflections by outlining some advice to new tutors in the form

of “dos” and “don’ts”. The final section summarises and concludes.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The theme of a strong “research emphasis” in economics departments

and the reflection of this emphasis in tenure and promotion incentives

is highlighted by such authors as Butler et al. (1994), Guest & Duhs

(2002) and Colander & McGoldrick (2009). The negative impact that

these incentives can have on the quality of economics teaching is

identified by Becker (1997) in the U.S. context and Guest & Duhs

(2002) in the Australian context. Butler et al. (1994, p.15) also note the

dynamic by which this effect is enhanced when doctoral students are

employed as tutors. Since “research skills receive approximately five

times more emphasis than teaching skills in the content of learning

material presented to doctoral students in business”, doctoral students

are well prepared for teaching in terms of their knowledge of economic

theory and their technical skills, but they are poorly prepared in terms

of their understanding of how students learn and they are unfamiliar

with many pedagogical techniques. Doctoral students themselves seem

to be aware of this gap. McGoldrick et al. (2010, pp.199-200) comment

on the results of a survey in which “48 percent of those teaching their

own classes without faculty guidance reported having no preparation”

and “graduate students . . . rated their preparation for research as being

more important than their preparation for teaching”. This is a curious

state of affairs since, as McGoldrick et al. (2010, p.200) point out, it is

“more likely that a PhD graduate in economics who is interested in

academic life will wind up in a position at a teaching-oriented

institution rather than a research one.”

An important dimension of teaching that new educators, whose focus

is discipline-specific content, can easily over look, therefore, is how

students learn. One would think that having some understanding of

learning processes would be a very effective tool for designing even

simple teaching strategies for the classroom. A range of approaches

have been used to analyze learning processes and these approaches

seem to suggest that teaching strategy matters for effective student

learning. One of the oldest and most famous approaches is Edgar Dale’s

“Learning Pyramid” developed at the National Training Laboratories


in Betel, Maine during the 1940s (see Dale 1946). Dale’s “Cone of

Experience”, “Cone of Learning” or “Learning Pyramid” is illustrated

in Figure 1. This approach classifies learning-related activities such as

attending lectures, reading, and engaging in discussion, in terms of the

effect they have on retention of material 24 hours after the activity.

Lecturing, for example, is associated with a low retention rate compared

to engaging in group discussion or some more active learning process.

Lalley & Miller (2007) raise a series of questions about this approach,

however, arguing that the evidence on which it is based is difficult to

identify despite the fact that it is widely cited.

Figure 1: Dale’s Learning Pyramid

Another well-known approach is Bloom et al.’s (1956) taxonomy

that divides effective learning processes into stages made up of

remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, synthesing and

evaluating. When students focus on remembering and understanding,

they achieve what Ramsden (1992, p.46) calls “surface learning” which

may generate knowledge but students are unlikely to retain such

knowledge for very long beyond the exam period. It is only when a

student engages in the higher levels of Bloom’s schema that they

achieve what Ramsden calls “deep learning” and are likely to retain

knowledge for longer.

A third approach is Kolb’s (1984) theory of experiential learning in

which learning involves a cycle of experience, reflection, crystallisation

of concepts from that reflection, and then active experimentation with

new experiences (cf. Murphy 2007). Kolb (1976) also developed his so-

called Learning Styles Inventory which classifies learning styles along

36 A. Lim

two continua: a concrete experience versus abstract conceptualization

continuum; and an active experimentation versus reflective observation

continuum. Students whose learning style lies more along the concrete

experience end of the first continuum and more along the active

experimentation end of the second continuum have what Kolb defines

as an “accommodator” learning style while those who prefer reflection

and abstraction he dubs an “assimilator” style.

Figure 2: Kolb’s Learning Styles Source: Loo (2002, p.253)

Stokes & Wright (2012) synthesise some of the perspectives outlined

above in terms of four modified learning styles: Visual where students

have a preference for observing and reflecting upon images as a way of

learning new concepts and ideas, for example symbolic representations,

graphs and videos; Auditory, where students’ preferences are for

listening to verbal explanation and discussion of new ideas; Read/Write,

where students learn by engaging with texts at their own pace and

processing the new ideas learned by writing notes or reflections that

express the new learning; and Kinesthetic, where learning experiences

focus more on physical movement and participation. Few students

appear to be auditory learners despite the fact that a large proportion of

classroom activities in economics lectures and tutorials use auditory

media (See Becker & Watts 1996, p.450). More students seem to be


visual learners, learning through what they see. Thus graphs,

flowcharts and detailed descriptions help students to form concepts in

their minds. However, an abundance of students appear to be

kinesthetic learners (See Salemi 2002). The effectiveness of this

approach shows up in the bottom three ranks of Dale’s learning pyramid

in Figure 1.

These frameworks for understanding how learning occurs suggest

that what happens in the classroom matters and that the lack of

pedagogical preparation that most doctoral students and honours

graduates bring to tutorials is likely to be sub-optimal. Several authors

have thus suggested implementing tutor development programs that

provide basic training for new tutors that will give them a suite of

strategies to cater to the variety of learning styles. Jocoy (2006), for

example, suggests that appropriate training should include the use of

classroom activities apart from lecturing such as case studies, videos

and role-play activities. Becker (1997) suggests note taking, graph

drawing, and group activities.

Bell et al. (2010), however, argue that the early experience of

teaching itself can contribute to educator training if new tutors can be

encouraged to reflect on that experience. Thus an important part of tutor

development programs might be to show tutors how to engage in such

reflection effectively, for example, by conducting mock tutorials with

peer observation and feedback followed by structured tutor self-

reflection and de-briefing. Bell et al. (2010) report on the conduct of a

professional development program for tutors that included these

features. In this program, 25 tutors were asked to comment on what they

learned from observing their colleagues, what they gained from their

colleagues’ feedback, and what they would apply to their own teaching.

Almost fifty per cent of participants commented that being observed by

a peer and receiving peer feedback provided a different and more

helpful perspective on their teaching than receiving student feedback.

Such exercises can thus increase the educational-self-awareness of new

tutors and enhance their ability to engage in on-going critical self-

reflection.

This literature thus implies that students learn in different ways and

that different methods of teaching have different long term effects on

learning outcomes. One implication of this might be that new tutors

should receive training in which they are introduced to alternative

teaching methods. Another might be that developing the skill of self-

38 A. Lim

reflection and learning from such reflection could be a powerful on-

going tool for new teachers. The literature does not, however, appear to

consider the transition from student to teacher itself. Bartlett (2006)

constructs a list of “Do’s and Don’ts” for novice tutors that recognizes

the need for new instructors to make this transition but, again, the nature

of the actual transition is not explicitly considered.

3. THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING AN ECONOMICS

STUDENT

The first and possibly most important aspect of my own experience as

an economics student was that I very much liked the subject of

economics. I first became interested when I learned about

hyperinflation in Germany. My fascination with this disruptive episode,

as well as with other financial crises, led me to major in economics and

finance in my undergraduate degree. A key lesson from economics that

made particular sense to me was that people respond to incentives, and

this was central to the reason for financial crises.1 But this lesson about

incentives is applicable in a wide range of contexts and the power of

ideas like this is one of the things that made economics so interesting.

The operation of incentives can affect one’s choice of which mobile

phone plan to purchase, whether to buy or rent a house, or how to

manage one’s investments on the share market. A key complaint I used

to hear from my fellow students about economics, mainly in relation to

difficult mathematics, was “How does this apply in the real world? Do

I really need this to do my job when I graduate?” But I always thought

that the fantastic thing about economics was that it did make sense of

how the real world worked. I thus found economics interesting because

I saw its applicability, and given my fellow students’ complaints, this

applicability is something they also desired and they were frustrated

when they could not see it.

Another important and motivating force in my undergraduate

experience was the opportunity to engage with my teachers. I most

enjoyed classes where there was a positive and friendly relationship

between the class and the teacher, and where the teacher was open to

questions, and discussion, and was prepared to discuss alternative

viewpoints. Such positive pedagogical attitudes motivated my interest

in the subject further and I am sure that I learned more in these classes

1 See, for example, Calomiris (2011) for a discussion of incentives that enhanced the

creation and accumulation of high risk mortgages prior to the Global Financial Crisis.


than in those where the teacher was defensive, dismissive or even

impatient with students. I also appreciated tutors and lecturers who went

the extra mile, particularly during my honours and more recent

postgraduate study, and were approachable or flexible with consultation

hours.

I did, however, find some aspects of being a student difficult. There

were occasions when the motivation to study was wanting, particularly

in relation to material I found less intuitive and interesting. On some of

those occasions I would find myself working on concepts that I already

understood and wandering down paths to material not covered in the

syllabus but which aroused my curiosity. This was partly a matter of

discipline and time management but it was also a matter of containing

an unsatisfied interest and intellectual curiosity. This seemed counter

intuitive while enrolled in a higher education institution. Part of the

problem was knowing where to start on new topics since I could on

occasion find myself disoriented with the array of new information to

be mastered and the lack of an overall framework through which to

understand and make sense of that new material. The prospect of

“starting over” (in a conceptual sense) with new material could,

therefore, be quite exhausting on occasion.

My experience of being a student was thus characterised by a strong

interest and motivation to study economics, by being plugged into a

supportive and collegial learning community, and by the struggle of

knowing how to approach large amounts of complex, new material.

Other students may well have experiences different to mine but from

my discussion with fellow students over the years, it seems that my

experience is not uncommon. The next section reflects on some of the

issues involved in moving from this experience, in which I was

ultimately relatively successful as a student, to the role of economics

tutor.

4. THE TRANSITION TO ECONOMICS TUTOR

My experience as a tutor began in 2011 when I took on private tuition

of undergraduate and high school economics students to earn some

extra money as a senior undergraduate and honours student. I was also

a Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) facilitator in economics and

finance for two years prior to that.2 I completed my honours year in

2 See Packham & Miller (2000) for a description of Peer Assisted Learning.

40 A. Lim

2013 and then began tutoring in undergraduate economics, finance and

marketing courses on a full time basis across a number of universities

in Sydney. I have also privately tutored post-graduate students.

A number of issues can be identified in my transition experience,

some of which are not at all surprising. The first was the responsibility

of knowing content material well and being able not just to explain it to

students but to anticipate questions that might arise and make sure that

I had reasonable answers to such questions. This marked a change from

my experience as a student mainly in terms of the detail and extent of

preparation. I would prepare well for classes as a student and my aim

was to understand the material reasonably thoroughly, but the

difference between that and teaching preparation (and I only realised

this in my second year of teaching), was needing to know content

beyond what I was teaching so that I could anticipate and handle

questions effectively. This additional step took a surprising amount of

effort and time. It is also easy to take this too far and to over-prepare

content and in fact to make material too difficult for students at a

particular level. This appears also to be a challenge for doctoral

students undergoing content-focused training themselves since they

have a natural inclination to draw on that concurrent experience.

A second issue was one of authority and confidence. Deciding on a

persona that would enhance my teaching was challenging. Being too

casual (my preferred style) ran the risk of not being taken sufficiently

seriously by students but being too formal seemed false and unlikely to

encourage the kind of non-threatening educational atmosphere which I

valued myself as a student. There was also a related third issue of

knowing how tough to be in the grading process. None of these issues

are really very surprising in retrospect nor, from talking to other new

teachers, are they unusual.

But an additional and overarching fourth transition issue for me was

the change in mindset from simply participating actively in tutorials as

a student to motivating the learning of others. This wasn’t just about

knowing the material well and communicating to others or commanding

the appropriate level of respect so that I was taken seriously. It was

about how to inspire learning. This is also related to the issue of

classroom engagement. Some classes have plenty of students who enjoy

asking questions and engaging in discussion while others make it

difficult to generate discussion and student involvement. What I failed

to consider from my early teaching experience was the different


learning styles of my students. This would greatly explain why my

classes had different dynamics. I did not consider that there were more

appropriate learning activities to cater for each individual student’s

needs. As an example, an activity such as “think-pair-share” could have

been used. Students first think individually about the problem at hand,

then share their ideas with the person beside them, and then finally after

this discussion, share the pair’s ideas with the class. I believe this

activity would have been especially useful with the quieter classes I

taught. Reflecting on my student feedback, I have realised that students

were not volunteering their answers because they were uncertain of the

validity of their responses. However I noticed that students gain

confidence when consulting their peers and realising that their

responses were reasonable after all. I’ve thus had to think carefully

about how best to engage students.

During my undergraduate degree, I had a lecturer who selected

students to answer particular questions, and it was humiliating if you

didn’t know the answer. I didn’t want my students to be so afraid of

being selected that they would stop coming to class (attendance in the

courses I’ve taught has not been compulsory), so I’ve tended to refrain

from using that method. I have thought about suggesting that students

draw graphs on the board, however I’ve been of the view that this might

only benefit the learning of the particular student at the board,

especially if he or she is a kinesthetic learner, rather than the rest of the

class. If the graph is drawn incorrectly then the issue is how to correct

the student without embarrassing them and making sure the rest of the

class is not learning an incorrect approach. It can also be time

consuming to rectify a student’s mistake which is an issue when there

is a lot of material to be covered in a particular class. I once had to teach

a class around group presentations but, unfortunately, many of the

presentations were poorly executed and contained errors. This caused

complications and ended up being unproductive for most of the students

involved. So the change in mindset from worrying just about my own

learning to effectively facilitating the learning of others was a

considerable challenge.

There have also been some positives about the transition process. I’ve

actually enjoyed coming to a more thorough understanding of the

material I’ve dealt with in my classes. There is considerable truth in the

saying that if you want to really understand something then you need to

teach it. I’ve also derived great satisfaction from seeing my students

42 A. Lim

come to a realization of how economic theories work and how those

theories illuminate observable economic phenomena, one of the things

that inspired me as a student. In fact seeing this happen to my own

students has been a major motivating force for me as a teacher.

The transition from student to teacher thus has some benefits as well

as some challenges. The benefits are coming to better understanding

one’s self of material being taught and the satisfaction of seeing others

inspired to learn. The challenges are those of preparing appropriate

content, commanding and asserting appropriate authority over students

who are not that much younger than oneself and adopting the right

persona in this respect, and knowing how tough to be in the grading

process. There is also, however, a change in mindset from just being

responsible for one’s own learning to thinking about how to facilitate

and inspire learning in others. The following section reflects more

deeply on these transition issues.

5. REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANSITION

Looking back on this transition from economics student to tutor it seems

that two big factors interacted to shape how I negotiated that

experience. I suspect that these factors are likely to be applicable to the

experience of other new tutors. The first relates to the demands of the

knowledge content involved in teaching and the psychology of

knowledge management. As discussed above, being on top of what one

has to know as a junior economics instructor is a challenging task and

could consume all of one’s thinking about what is involved in being an

instructor. The psychology of managing that knowledge can operate to

reinforce this perspective. There is something very satisfying about

moving from being one of the many learners of knowledge in a class to

its single “knowledge authority”. One can thus seek to reinforce or

support the legitimacy of that new status by focusing on the knowledge

itself and making sure that it is as secure as possible. This is a big and

very natural temptation. It can even be taken to an extreme where it

spills over into an unacceptable condescension towards students,

especially students who find acquiring that knowledge themselves a

difficult task. I have seen this unfortunate attitude in more than one new

teacher.

But the second factor in the transition was recognising that an

important dimension of being an instructor is helping students to

acquire economic knowledge and its associated skills and this required

a shifting of the focus away from knowledge itself and toward the


process of learning. This doesn’t mean that knowledge isn’t important.

It simply means that the additional task of how students acquire

knowledge and skills must be addressed. The knowledge component of

the process is so big that many new instructors don’t see this additional

aspect and all of their preparation time is thus spent reinforcing their

knowledge. For the smartest tutors this may actually mean reduced

preparation time because they regard the relevant knowledge as already

secure. But what is really needed is thought about how students will

learn the knowledge we want them to acquire.

In my experience, this second factor asserted itself very strongly,

partly because of a residual awareness from my time as a student that

many things in economics were difficult to learn and partly because of

my early involvement with the PASS program. PASS downplays the

knowledge aspect for tutors and places a great deal of attention on the

learning process itself. Part of the explicit PASS philosophy is that

students will discover answers through discussion amongst themselves

rather than the facilitator “spoon feeding” answers to them. The

structure of PASS sessions is, therefore, quite different from the

atmosphere in typical economics or finance tutorials. PASS sessions are

not designed to be standard classes with an “authoritative” teacher “out

the front”. The facilitator is not supposed to be “teaching” in the typical

sense but rather to be guiding students in their understanding of the

relevant material. In preparation for this role I attended a two day

induction workshop where I was exposed to ideas on how to prepare

appropriate classroom activities that would encourage students to

collaborate with each other. At this workshop, some ideas such as

‘think-pair-share’ and ‘jigsaw’ (cf. Becker 1997), ‘celebrity heads’,

‘jeopardy’ and others were introduced.

In the early semesters of being a facilitator, I spent a lot of time

preparing sessions. I used a variety of activities to aid students to learn

key concepts. As a facilitator, I would redirect questions I was asked to

other students who might know the answer. Sometimes I would ask

students to volunteer answers, and other times I would nominate

someone to suggest an answer. Alternatively, I would give hints by

asking a variety of open and closed questions to guide students towards

the right answer. As a facilitator, I was expected to keep a session plan

and to have prepared appropriate activities. In addition, I would be

observed at least once per semester by another facilitator to receive

feedback on how I conducted the session.

44 A. Lim

My transition into teaching has also been influenced by my

experience as a student in three ways. Firstly, drawing on my

experience as a student where I found it difficult to know where to start

understanding a new topic, I have, as a tutor, tended to identify the core

ideas in a new topic and then develop the simplest explanation of those

ideas I can, so that students have a clear entry point into this new

material and can put it in context. Secondly, I have tried to point to real

world examples so that the power of ideas have acted, as much as

possible, as a motivator for students to learn. Thirdly, I have tried to

design activities that involve students in as active a way as possible in

the learning process, drawing upon the Dale, Bloom and Kolb

perspectives discussed in Section 2. A good example of this approach

is my use of case studies which builds on Kennedy’s (2006) uses of

short, one or two sentence news clips to discuss macroeconomic

principles from real life. The case studies I used were longer than this,

mainly one page articles and mostly edited, so that students could focus

on particular issues which were the subject of discussion questions set

for them. I would then ask students to work on the questions in groups.

For the case study, I randomly assigned students to groups of 3-5, where

one member from each group would enter group answers into a URL I

provided. This URL took them to a Google Forms page. Once all group

answers had been submitted, I would “mark” the responses using an

add-in called Flubaroo and declare a particular group the winner. From

there, I would randomly pick a group to explain why they structured

their answers in a particular way. In the last case study, I asked students

to record their answers on a piece of paper as I wanted them to draw

graphs and discuss amongst themselves why they would draw a graph

a certain way. At the same time, I was able to follow the discussions by

walking around the classroom and asking open-ended questions to lead

students to the right answer.3

My approach has, on the whole, been appreciated by students as the

following quotations from open-ended comments in subject feedback

surveys indicate:

3 Bartlett (2006) suggests a cooperative learning activity, where groups of students are to

read a news article or case and to respond to associated questions. When all groups have

decided on an answer, a member would be randomly chosen to present this answer to the

rest of the class. Following each groups presentation, all group’s would join to discuss

and come to a final answer. Currently, I employ this method when I conduct case studies.


Great at simplifying economics, making it easier to understand.

Explains answers to questions in detail, also explains why other answers

are incorrect.

Never just gave an answer without explaining why it was correct and

how we got there. Found ways of explaining concepts that were more

relatable and easier to understand.

[The] tutor explained things in such a way that made things extremely

clear and presented real world situations to apply the knowledge.

A related advantage of being a teacher after recently having been a

student has been my ability to identify mistakes I might have made as a

student when solving particular problems and being on the lookout for

students making these same mistakes or warning students about the

danger of making them. This has been welcomed positively by students

as the following feedback comment indicates:

She explains her thought process which is always very similar to how I

approach the questions but then also goes as far as to explain what

mistakes she would have been tempted to make and why they'd be

incorrect. A lot of the time these are mistakes I've also made along the

way so it's great to not just get the answers, but to understand exactly

how the maths works and why it works in that way.

I’ve also drawn on my appreciation of the social dimension of

learning and have attempted to create a positive collegial learning

environment. I have made it a habit to be available for consultation and

to be as encouraging and helpful as I can. Like me, the occasional

student may find it is useful to have extra resources that explain

concepts at a deeper level than we had time to cover in class, and so

pointing students to these resources and discussing issues outside class

is something that has characterised my teaching.

This reflection on my transition from student to tutor suggests some

issues for further pedagogical research and some policy options that

economics department heads might consider implementing. While in

my transition experience, the balance between knowledge management

and pedagogical awareness allowed considerable room for the latter to

shape my approach to teaching, the balance of these factors in the

transition experience of other new tutors might be quite different. This

may in turn have an impact on their initial approach to teaching and

possibly on their effectiveness as a new teacher. It would thus be useful

to collect survey data on a substantial cross section of new tutors which

asks them about their experience as students and their practices as new

46 A. Lim

tutors. This data could then be combined with data on student

satisfaction with their teaching, and possibly student performance in

their courses, to explore the relationship between background student

experience, early pedagogical practice, and teaching effectiveness.

From a policy perspective, my experience suggests the value of Bell’s

et al. (2010) idea of reflective practice on teaching effectiveness. By

reflecting on my experience as both a new tutor but also as a previous

student, I have made improvements to my teaching that I think has

enhanced its effectiveness. The suggested further research outlined

above would establish whether this principle has wider applicability. If

it does, then there is a case for department heads facilitating the

involvement of new tutors in programs designed to develop this kind of

reflective practice.

My transition from student to teacher has thus involved the balancing

of the two forces of knowledge management and pedagogical

awareness but my experience as a student has partly shaped that

transition in what I think have been some quite positive ways. The next

section offers some gratuitous advice to novice teachers based on this

experience.

6. DO’S AND DONT’S FOR NEW TEACHERS

Following Bartlett (2006) this section distils the experience outlined

above into a set of dos and don’ts for new tutors.

Do:

• Be prepared. Being thoroughly prepared gives you a basic

confidence that is necessary although not sufficient for effective

teaching. If you aren’t prepared, you’ll find yourself attempting to

work things out in class and it is easier under these circumstances

to make mistakes;

• Anticipate where students may struggle and have back-up

explanations for these aspects of the material;

• Accommodate multiple types of learners. Use pictures, analogies,

case studies and media clips. The models of learning outlined

above all indicate that students learn in different ways and being

able to appeal to these different modes will make you a more

effective teacher. Make open-minded use of tutor training sessions

to develop a suite of methods that can be used in your teaching;

• Use technology. I’ve found using the whiteboard difficult due to

my short stature (so I am unable to utilise the majority of the board)

and in some rooms, parts of the whiteboard are obscured by the


lectern and computer. A fantastic alternative is the document

camera, which allows you to write/draw diagrams in a notepad and

have this projected on to the screen. This is my preferred teaching

tool, as I can write in my normal sized font and students would

have no problem copying from the screen. In some classrooms

however, there is no document camera, so I would connect my

iPad to the projector; 4

• Be on time. This is a tough one for me. Bartlett (2006) has stated

that it is better to explain fewer concepts in more detail with the

limited amount of time you have, than to explain more concepts

with less detail. Ideally I would like the former, however tutors do

not necessarily have complete control over what topics they would

like to cover. Rather, we are given the material and expected to

cover it in the allotted time. Some tutors manage this by covering

the material at their own pace and continuing it in the next week. I

find this difficult to do (and I prefer to cover topics in line with

lectures) so I have refrained from this. I manage my time now by

keeping a firm eye on my watch and asking students that require

more in-depth explanations to see me in my consultation hours;

• Learn names. This helps to build rapport and encourages more

participation in class. One possibility is to create a seating plan and

have students sit in the same seats for the first few weeks. You can

pass around a seating chart for students to fill in where they are

sitting and perhaps take a class photograph and label it with

students’ names. Though I see this method as the most efficient,

there may be privacy concerns with this;

• Be approachable. Make students comfortable to ask questions in

class. I adopt an approachable manner from Week 1 by trying to

put myself on an equal footing with students in class. I tend to dress

casually and use unsophisticated language that connects with

students. Further, I remind students of the consequences of not

asking questions for themselves;

4 This has been very successful with my second year microeconomics students, who have

stated: “The use of her iPad is an efficient method of teaching and easy to follow. The

explanations were very detailed and clear which extra explanations and working out

shown especially with numerical calculations”; “The stylus/iPad combination was great

as it was both fast and accurate in demonstrating some of the concepts. She also spoke

coherently and really put a lot of effort in making sure everyone understood the concepts”

and “I love it when she uses the iPad to show tutorial solutions.”

48 A. Lim

• Walk around the class when students are discussing (e.g. a case

study) and give hints to students who are struggling;

• Encourage students to discuss topics with each other. Not only

does this maximise classroom engagement, but it also encourages

them to socialise outside of class. This will also minimise the work

you may have to do in consulting with students, if they are

consulting with each other before coming to see you;

• Use humour. This would create a relaxed and comfortable

atmosphere for students to communicate with you;

• Give breaks for longer classes. Buckles & Hoyt (2006) suggested

to include a discussion break for lengthy classes where students

could discuss with each other and the instructor any concepts that

they do not understand. Discussion breaks could encourage more

interaction between students as well as with the instructor.

Don’t:

• Guess an answer to a student’s question. If you don’t know the

answer, admit it and collect their contact details so that you can get

back to them. Alternatively, if the question is asked in class, let the

class know that you will find out and get back to the students the

following week. Students will understand that you don’t know

everything, and if anything, it will comfort them to know that the

question isn’t just difficult for them. It is obviously dangerous if

students copy your mistakes in the exam;

• Over-explain. If you find yourself trying to explain why the

demand curve is downward-sloping, you’ve probably gone too far.

I try to limit obvious explanations to one to two sentences. Any

more than that, and I suggest students to revise the lecture slides,

or to see me outside of class. Students that ask simple questions

like this have obviously completed little preparation themselves

and by spending extra class time to answer these types of

questions, this punishes the majority of students that have already

prepared;

• Let students talk over you. If you do this, other students will notice

and not respect you. When I experience this, I tend to let the

offender/s know about the negative consumption externality that

they are causing other students. Everyone sees the humour, and the

offender doesn’t feel singled out so much that he/she will not

contribute to the class in future. If the problem doesn’t subside, I


would suggest sending the offender/s from the classroom. It is

better to do this than to let them disrupt the learning of others;

• Be condescending. What may be easy for you is probably very

difficult for someone else. I have to be very careful with this

myself, as some students have indicated in other subjects, I appear

to be condescending when students do not have the right answer.

If you appear as such, you can be assured that these students will

either switch to another tutorial or will not contribute in your class

again.

7. CONCLUSION

The objective of this paper has been to reflect on the transition from

being an economics student to being an economics tutor. Its reflections

have been deliberately subjective, representing the experience of only a

single novice teacher but economics has made extensive use of the

concept of the “representative agent” and this approach seems

reasonable for the purpose of identifying issues in the nature of this

transition for further research. The interaction of two significant factors

were identified as having shaped the nature of this transition in my

experience: the first revolved around the demands of the knowledge

content involved in teaching and the psychology of knowledge

management associated with the transition that makes the student a

sudden “expert”; the second factor was the need for new tutors to

recognise that being an instructor is about helping students to acquire

economic knowledge and not simply being a knowledge expert in their

eyes.

My transition from student to teacher thus involved the balancing of

these two factors but my experience as a student has partly shaped that

transition in some quite positive ways. Firstly, my experience as a

student where I found it difficult to know where to start understanding

a new topic, helped me as a tutor to identify the core ideas in a new

topic and then to develop simple explanations of those ideas and to

embed them within well-developed contexts to help students learn more

quickly. Secondly, the stimulation of my own interest as a student by

connections between economic theory and real economic phenomena

has shaped my commitment to using real world examples and

applications to motivate my own students. Thirdly, my own student

experience of engagement with teachers, fellow students and content

material has led me, with the help of some minimal teacher training, to

design teaching activities that involve students in as active a way as

50 A. Lim

possible. I have thus employed Bell et al.’s (2010) idea of critical

reflection on one’s own practice to enhance my own teaching.

This reflection suggests that useful research might employ survey

data from new tutors to explore the relationship between tutors’

perceptions of their experience as students, their early pedagogical

practices as tutors, and their effectiveness as teachers. It also suggests

the possibility of facilitating the development of reflective practice

techniques for new tutors. I concluded the paper with some gratuitous

advice to novice teachers based on the experience upon which the paper

reflected.

REFERENCES

Bartlett R.L. (2006) “The Evolution of Cooperative Learning and Economics

Instruction”, in Becker, W.E., Watts, M. and Becker, S.R. (eds.), Teaching

Economics: More Alternatives to Chalk and Talk, Cheltenham: Edward

Elgar Publishing Limited, pp.39-58.

Becker W.E. (1997) “Teaching Economics to Undergraduates”, Journal of

Economic Literature, 35 (3), pp.1347-1373.

Becker W.E. and Watts M. (1996) “Chalk and Talk: A National Survey on

Teaching Undergraduate Economics”, American Economic Review, 86

(2), pp.448-453.

Bell A., Mladenovic R. and Segara R. (2010) “Supporting the Reflective

Practice of Tutors: What do Tutors Reflect On?”, Teaching in Higher

Education, 15 (1), pp.57-70.

Bloom B.S., Engelhart M. D., Furst E. J., Hill W. H. and Krathwohl D. R.

(1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of

Educational Goals, New York: David McKay Company.

Buckles S. and Hoyt G.M. (2006) “Using Active Learning Techniques in

Large Lecture Classes”, in Becker W.E., Watts M. and Becker S.R. (eds.),

Teaching Economics: More Alternatives to Chalk and Talk, Cheltenham:

Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, pp.75-88.

Butler D.D., Laumer J.F. Jr. and Moore M. (1994) “Graduate Teaching

Assistants: Are Business Schools Focusing on Increasing Teaching

Excellence?”, Marketing Education Review, 4, pp.14-19.

Calomiris C.W. (2011) “Origins of the Subprime Crisis”, in Demirguc-Kunt

A., Evanoff D.D. and Kaufman G.G. (eds.), The International Financial

Crisis: Have the Rules of Finance Changed?, London: World Scientific,

pp.73-92.

Colander D. and McGoldrick K.M. (2009) “The Teagle Report”, in Colander

D. and McGoldrick K.M. (eds.), Educating Economists: The Teagle


Discussion on Re-evaluating the Undergraduate Major, Cheltenham, UK:

Edward Elgar, pp.3-39.

Dale E. (1946) Audio-visual Methods in Teaching, New York: The Dryden

Press.

Guest R. and Duhs A. (2002) “Economics Teaching in Australian

Universities: Rewards and Outcomes”, Economic Record, 78, pp.147–

160.

Jocoy C.L. (2006) “Surviving the First Time Through: A New Instructor’s

Views on Designing and Teaching Economic Geography and how

Mentoring Early-Career Faculty Can Help”, Journal of Geography in

Higher Education, 30 (3), pp.419-425.

Kennedy P.E. (2006) “The Macroeconomics Principles Course: What

Should Be Done?”, in Becker, W.E., Watts, M. and Becker, S.R. (eds.),

Teaching Economics: More Alternatives to Chalk and Talk, Cheltenham:

Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, pp.89-108.

Kolb D. A. (1976) Learning Style Inventory, Boston, MA: Hay Group.

Kolb D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of

Learning and Development, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lalley J.P. and Miller R.H. (2007) “The Learning Pyramid: Does it Point

Teachers in the Right Direction?”, Education, 128 (1), pp.64-79.

Loo R. (2002), “A Meta-Analytical Examination of Kolb’s Learning Style

Preferences among Business Majors”, Journal of Education for Business,

May/June, pp.252-256.

McGoldrick K., Hoyt G. and Colander D. (2010) “The Professional

Development of Graduate Students for Teaching Activities: The Students’

Perspective”, Journal of Economic Education, 41 (2), pp.194-201.

Murphy E.J. (2007) “A Review of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Kolb’s Theory

of Experiential Learning: Practical Uses for Prior Learning Assessment”,

Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 55 (3), pp.64-66.

Packham G. and Miller C. (2000), “Peer-Assisted Student Support: A New

Approach to Learning”, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 24 (1),

pp.55-65.

Ramsden P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education, London:

Routledge.

Salemi M. (2002) “An Illustrated Case for Active Learning”, Southern

Economic Journal, 68 (3), pp.721-31.

Stokes A. and Wright S. (2012) “More Effectively Engaging Students in

University Economics Courses”, Australasian Journal of Economics

Education, 9 (1), pp.1-20.



BOOK REVIEW

Review of Bowmaker S.W. (2010), The Heart of Teaching

Economics: Lessons from Leading Minds, Cheltenham, UK &

Northampton MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 410 pp + xvii.

Peter Docherty

Business School Economics Group,

University of Technology, Sydney

Simon Bowmaker’s The Heart of Teaching Economics explores the

approaches and attitudes to teaching of twenty one leading researchers

in a wide range of fields within economics. It employs a semi-structured

interview methodology where subjects were asked a common set of

questions but also follow-up questions or questions tailored to issues

specific to their circumstances or interests. The common questions

inquired about such things as: the source of inspiration for the

interviewee’s interest in economics; the nature of any influences from

their own economics teachers; the methods employed by the

interviewee in their teaching; how they understood the learning process

to work; the balance they struck in their teaching between formalism

and reality; what they liked and disliked about teaching; the degree to

which they engage with colleagues about teaching; and whether they

saw teaching and research as complements or substitutes. After an

opening overview chapter, Bowmaker presents the transcript of each

interview as a separate chapter, recording the subject’s responses to the

set of questions they were asked. Interviews are divided into three

groups, categorised by the subject matter taught by the interviewee.

These groups are: fundamentals, itself comprised of introductory and

intermediate micro and macro; tools, made up of game theory,

econometrics and behavioural economics; and applications, basically a

broad range of specialist fields within the discipline.

The value of Bowmaker’s volume is that it provides qualitative

evidence regarding the thinking about teaching at some of the United

States’ most prestigious universities. Given the role played by these

Book Review – The Heart of Teaching Economics 53

institutions in shaping the modern economics discipline, this evidence

is important. But it must also be noted that Bowmaker’s book is

inherently US-centric since while some of the scholars interviewed

were trained outside the U.S., not a single person interviewed holds a

position outside that country. Given the role that institutional culture

plays in shaping attitudes to teaching and research, and given the

distinctive culture of leading U.S. universities, inclusion of a few cross–

country interviewees would have made for some useful comparisons.

Bowmaker’s list of interview questions is also problematic in that he

provides no rationale or justification for his choice of these questions.

The questions are mostly sensible at an intuitive level but one would

have expected a teaching scholar to have thought about the conceptual

structure of these questions and to have drawn upon the relevant

educational literature in choosing them. Becker’s (1997) treatment of

undergraduate education or Hansen’s (2001) set of graduate

proficiencies, to cite two possibilities, would have provided such a

justification, but Bowmaker simply lists his questions without such

reflection.

To his credit, Bowmaker includes history of economic thought and

economic history in his third, applications section, but there is no

consideration of heterodox approaches to economics, such as Post-

Keynesian or institutional economics, and even more disappointingly,

there is no consideration of mathematics, economic philosophy or

methodology in the tools section. These latter omissions are curious

given that game theory and behavioural economics are regarded as tools

rather than as either specialist fields or as fundamental frameworks.

This, again, reflects a feature of Bowmaker’s approach that no rationale

is provided for his analytical choices. Here, a principle for

distinguishing between a conceptual tool and a particular theoretical or

methodological approach to economics was really required. It may well

be the case that many economists would be comfortable with

Bowmaker’s classification but this does not substitute for careful and

well-articulated analytical thinking.

The amount of material generated by Bowmaker’s questions is too

large to provide detailed comment in a short review but two central

matters are noteworthy. The first arises from Becker’s (1997) analysis

which highlights the importance of non-traditional teaching methods

because of the way educational theorists have increasingly argued that

people learn. Ramsden (1992, pp.15-85), for example, argues that

54 P. Docherty

people learn effectively not simply by hearing explanations or having

ideas transmitted to them, but by actively engaging with the ideas

embedded in those explanations, by using and exploring those ideas for

themselves (Ramsden 1992, p.81). Economists, according to Becker,

are notorious for their over-reliance on lecturing as an educational

method, a method that essentially presupposes a transmission theory of

learning rather than an engagement theory. Bowmaker’s question about

how interviewees understand the learning process is thus a question that

directly addresses one of the key issues in economic education, at least

from the stance of Becker’s (1997) analysis. It is thus of considerable

interest what leading economists think about the learning process.

Unfortunately, the responses to this question were disappointing, as

Bowmaker very diplomatically observes in his introduction to the book.

Virtually none of the economists interviewed had any idea about how

people learn and admitted as much, by and large without apology.

Responses such as “I’m not an expert on how humans learn, that’s for

sure”, “I don’t claim to know a lot about this”, and “I have to admit that

I haven’t really thought about this one” were common. More thoughtful

responses were made by Steven Landsburg, who recognised the

existence of a variety of learning styles, and the urban economist,

Edward Glaeser, who tantalisingly admitted the possibility of what

philosophers call a testimonial or credulist epistemology (see Pritchard

2014, pp.80, 84-85). According to this approach, we accept as true what

those around us tell us is true until we have good reason to doubt such

testimony. We thus learn by a process of socialisation. But the

implications of this interesting perspective were not really teased out in

much detail by Glaeser in the space available for his answer.

Probably the most considered answer came from behavioural

economist David Laibson who essentially made the distinction between

the transmission and engagement theories of learning highlighted

above. He strongly emphasised the importance of actively engaging

students in the classroom and outlined a number of ways in which he

did that, including by the use of classroom experiments (a sensible

strategy for a behavioural economist). Barry Eichengreen and John List

also acknowledged the importance of active learning. Robert Frank

correctly pointed out that academic economists receive little training in

education whether theoretical or practical, and are forced to rely on

intuition or their experience as students when they arrive in the

classroom after completing graduate school. This is despite the


existence of a substantial body of knowledge that has been accumulated

about how people learn. This is, of course, a point already made quite

forcefully by Colander & McGoldrick (2009) in The Teagle Report, but

it is a point worth repeating and it is interesting that the two behavioural

economists interviewed for the volume were those whose awareness of

learning processes was most acute.

The second noteworthy issue addressed by the responses in

Bowmaker’s volume is the relationship between teaching and research.

This is an issue of perennial interest and frustration for many academics

(see Becker & Kennedy 2005, p.172; and Colander & McGoldrick

2009, pp.8-14), and one might think that colleagues with considerable

research success and a strong on-going interest in teaching might have

something useful to say about the relationship between these activities.

In fact, given the strong research credentials of those interviewed, this

may well have been the most important contribution of Bowmaker’s

volume.

There are, again, unfortunately, grounds for disappointment. A good

number of the responses contained little more than homespun

platitudes, indicating that these respondents hadn’t really given the

matter any serious thought, and didn’t really have anything useful to

say on the subject. Of the other responses, a small number seemed to

think that the best researchers made the best teachers (naturally). For

one interviewee this was because some people are just more naturally

gifted than their peers and are thus better at everything (i.e. their

production possibility frontiers are further from the origin). For another

interviewee it is because the intellectual skills that enable a researcher

to choose important questions, and to arrive at insightful answers to

those questions, are the same skills required to communicate ideas

effectively to others and this lies at the heart of good teaching. A third

interviewee expressed it in terms of someone who wants to learn to

“play the flute” simply going to the best “flute player”.

These cases for complementarity were all based on teacher-

researcher characteristics rather than on the nature of the activities

themselves. A number of other interviewees cited the obvious trade-off

between the two activities based on the existence of a time constraint.

Some concluded that this was the dominating factor and that the two

activities were therefore inherent substitutes, while others allowed for

the complicating effects of joint production to overwhelm the effect of

the time constraint, making teaching and research complements.

56 P. Docherty

The most interesting responses on this issue came from Caroline

Hoxby, John List, and Robert Gordon. Caroline Hoxby argued that the

precise relationship between teaching and research was different in the

short and long runs. The short-run was characterised, according to

Hoxby, by the binding time constraint, so that the two activities where

essentially substitutes. The long-run, however, introduced the

possibility of questions from good students, which force the instructor

into deeper thinking about the issues, and this can generate good

research questions, making the two activities complementary. John List

thought that there was an inherent complementarity up to the point of

teaching one class in any area, but beyond that point, teaching and

research become substitutes. The source of this complementarity for

List, lay in preparation rather than in student engagement. It is

preparation that forces one to think deeply about the field, and which

may bring to one’s attention new ideas for research. But once the

preparation is done, additional time teaching may be spent on research,

and the complementarity evaporates.

Macroeconomist Robert Gordon argued for a deep complementarity

which arises from the approach he takes to teaching intermediate

macroeconomics, to writing and constantly updating his textbook in this

field, and which he also uses in his teaching, and to his research. For

Gordon, teaching is not so much about working through the mechanics

of formal models for their own sake but about looking at, and

attempting to explain, real economic phenomena. He certainly uses

formal models to do this, and he certainly works through the mechanics

of these models as part of his approach to teaching. But economic

questions and phenomena are the focus rather than the models, and this

appears to make a big difference as to how his teaching and research

are related. He thus makes considerable use of data from his textbook

in his teaching, and because he researches in empirical

macroeconomics, data from his research is also used in this way so that

his research informs his teaching. But his discussion of economic

phenomena with students raises issues which feed into his research both

because new questions or connections occur to him as he engages in

this discussion, and because bright students also pose questions which

sometimes lead to new research ideas. The complementarity here

appears to be a genuine two-way, highly integrated relationship.

Bowmaker’s interviews, therefore, add the support of useful

qualitative evidence to the conclusions we can draw from Becker &


Kennedy’s (2005) systematic documentation of the teaching-research

nexus. And Gordon’s reflections provide a rich and exemplary model

of the potential for a closely integrated nexus which a more limited

survey would not have been able to pick up.

An additional issue that stood out from the discussion in Bowmaker’s

interviews was the issue of why more women do not study economics

and go on to become academic economists. The three interviews in

which this was raised were those with Caroline Hoxby, Shoshana

Grossbard and Nancy Folbre. Caroline Hoxby attributed the low

involvement of women in the profession to its “male-dominated”

culture which she saw as revolving around pride in mathematical

prowess although she did not think that women were reluctant to

employ formal modelling in their work. Shoshana Grossbard also cited

mathematics as a potential obstacle for women becoming more

interested in economics, not so much because of any lack ability in this

area but because of the level of abstraction that tends to characterise

mathematical approaches to economics. She seemed to think that

women might be more interested in approaches to economics that were

grounded in more realistic perspectives, citing the rise of empirical

fields under the influence of James Heckman as a positive example.

Nancy Folbre went further and explicitly linked economic methodology

to masculine perspectives on the world, particularly its emphasis on

individualist, self-interested motivation. She thought that a female

perspective was more likely to bring the social interdependency of

things like preferences into the analysis, so that the more tolerance for

such perspectives there was in the discipline, the more likely it would

be for women to be interested in an economics career.

Of these three interviewees, none were able to point to female role

models or teachers that had had a significant intellectual influence on

the development of their careers, indicating the importance of this set

of questions. Curiously, questions about impediments to women

becoming economists, or the role of women in the profession, appeared

to be put to none of the male interviewees.

The prize for the most engaging interview for me went to that with

Robert Gordon. This was not because I agreed with him on a number of

the perspectives he offered in the interview but because his passion for

explaining economic phenomena was so clearly apparent. In answering

a number of the questions, his focus went immediately to ideas, and I

found myself thinking about economics (rather than about teaching),

58 P. Docherty

and why I did or did not agree with him. I could imagine that he would

be an excellent teacher precisely because this passion would be

contagious, and students would be motivated to think about economics

and engage with it as a result. But I had this reaction to only one of the

twenty one interviews in the volume, and this is why most teachers need

to know something about the learning process, and why they need

strategies to engage students more actively. Most teachers will not have

Gordon’s inherently inspirational approach to their teaching and will

need to draw on a broader knowledge base and skill set to enhance the

effectiveness of their teaching.

Overall, Bowmaker’s volume will be interesting to many engaged

teachers of economics because it is always fascinating to see how

various leading names of the discipline approach the same task that we

each have to execute in our own departments. This is especially true for

names in the fields within which we individually work. But I suspect

many will be disappointed with what they find. I also think that

Bowmaker himself could have grounded the volume in a more scholarly

approach that drew upon the educational literature in economics and

beyond to justify and refine his approach.

REFERENCES

Becker W.E. (1997), “Teaching Economics to Undergraduates”, Journal of

Economic Literature, 35, September, pp.1347-73.

Becker W.E. and Kennedy P.E. (2005), “Does Teaching Enhance Research

in Economics?”, American Economic Review, 95 (2), pp.172-176.

Colander D. and McGoldrick K.M. (2009) “The Teagle Report”, in Colander

D. and McGoldrick K.M. (eds.), Educating Economists: The Teagle

Discussion on Re-evaluating the Undergraduate Major, Cheltenham, UK:

Edward Elgar, pp.3-39.

Hansen W.L. (2001), “Expected Proficiencies for Undergraduate Economics

Majors”, Journal of Economic Education, pp.231-242.

Pritchard D. (2014), What is this Thing called Knowledge?, Third edition,

London: Routledge.

Ramsden P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education, London:

Routledge.

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