I thought today's class session had a better feel than previous sessions, especially the early discussion where we just talked without the PowerPoint. The basis for that was your blog posts, which allowed a launch point from which we could push the conversation further. I will spend some time thinking about this week's prompt with an attempt to sustain and improve on that for next week. I hope you can also give some thought to how the discussions would increase in value and get the students to do more of the driving of the conversation.
I do want to reiterate here that for students who hadn't commented on other student posts, please do so before Thursday's class. The expectation is that you will comment on a team member's post and then one other post by a student not on your team. I'm sure each of you will like receiving comments on what you have written. And if you do enjoy getting them, it should help you in writing interesting comments. As with the in class conversation, the goal is push the discussion forward, get the writer to reflect a bit on what they wrote - did he or she really mean what was said, can more context be given to make the point sharper - and if there is an area either of consensus or disagreement to accentuate that. Perhaps some of it should be brought into the in class discussion.
I next want to give my perspective on the undergraduate student research issue. Please note this is only my view. I don't speak for the Econ department on this. But I do have rather strong views on this matter. Let's first look at the demand side of this and peel it a bit. Why do students want to do research projects with faculty members? Possible reasons are because they expect to do other econ research in the future and this is a way to get started with that, because they would like to engage with a faculty member in a one-on-one basis outside of the class setting, or to earn a credential that presumably will be of some benefit for the student. All three of these make sense if the student wants to go to Econ grad school. In our class, I don't believe anyone is in that category. I can see the second one continuing to make sense otherwise, but if the first one doesn't make sense I don't really understand why the third should. I'll get to that second one a little more in a bit.
On the supply side there is first the question of whether doctoral students in Econ who want to do research get well matched with faculty. When I was an active Econ faculty member, this matching was imperfect, with some students not finding a research opportunity. (Indeed, many students are TAs to pay the bills. Even if they would find being an RA more rewarding, there weren't enough of those to go around. Prior to the writing of the dissertation, I believe that being involved in a research project without being an RA is kind of rare.) There is a different issue about whether the student is well prepared to engage in the research and what training provides good preparation. I don't have a good general answer for this but for me as the researcher, I'd want the student to have had a course from me already that is relevant for the research and then I'd want the student to have shown me something in the course. This should be a two-way street. Each party needs to benefit from the relationship.
Related to that benefit, there is the question of whether incentives are put in place for the faculty member to support the activity. I'm not current on this so what I say is dated, but when I was fully involved in the department, the metric that one reported on the CV for salary increases or for promotion was dissertation committees involved in and in particular being the student's main adviser. That did matter. I don't know if the practice has changed since, but having undergraduate students as research assistants didn't count. If it doesn't count, then from the faculty member's perspective this is burden without reward. I know I've talked a lot about being a good citizen in class, but there are limits to that, particularly if the function otherwise doesn't seem to have value. Doing the activity so the student has a credential and that being the sum total of the benefit, why bother? You're a good citizen because you agree with the goal the good citizenship is supposed to promote.
I believe these issues are quite different in the laboratory sciences, where the research lab may have some jobs that are suitable for undergraduates, so they can begin their apprenticeship that way. In Econ, however, I really believe that it would be better to have undergraduates involved with the teaching. In the 1990s, I heavily relied on undergraduate TAs, who conducted online office hours. The institution didn't have a credentialing way of rewarding the behavior, so the students earned an hourly wage for doing the activity. The students treated the activity as a reward, took it seriously, and were effective in that role. I believe many of the students currently taking the class benefited from the approach. And they were able to have regular interactions with me. Further, I only needed to do a modest amount of training for them, because each of them had previously taken the class, so they could see how the model worked from that experience.
I think the institution as a whole should move that model in a big way, but currently it is esoteric. I could do it in intermediate micro, because that course didn't have graduate TAs. By teaching a larger lecture (180 students instead of 60 students) I could free up enough resources to pay the undergrads (and have the department net some dollars in addition)! The practice, however, didn't persist after I became a full time administrator.
One general lesson from this, applicable to our course, is that there are many institutional arrangements, such as the undergraduate research project, that aren't fully engineered to make it work for all parties involve. When that happens, the organization looks dysfunctional and unfeeling. I think you're seeing some of that.
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