On the agenda for May's EconEdChat were 3 questions:
What do Economics teachers need to know about the Discover Economics campaign?
How do we ensure students get practice using data and what data sources are useful?
What experience or knowledge do we want students to arrive with at the start of Economics A-Level?
This post focuses on the second question, you can first question here and the second here. We were lucky enough to be joined by Professor Sarah Smith, Head of the School of Economics at Bristol, and Co-Chair of Discover Economics.
Links/References/Resources:
I love basically everything that Economics Observatory write, but their Data Stories are excellent and strike that really difficult balance of being detailed and in-depth whilst still being just about accessible for the weakest students.
I ended up thinking quite a lot of about 'what does or doesn't this graph show' and made this worksheet on inequality data
I mention the Core Maths qualification
Visual Capitalist has lots of infographics
Economist daily charts does what it says on the tin
Dame Rachel Griffith has done some great work on communicating the effects of the economics of obesity, I'm not sure exactly which video Gavin was referring to as she has done so many, but this is her RES Past Presidents Address and you can get the slides here , which are really accessible. She has also guest-edited a collection of materials on Economics Observatory, including this one which I've written some questions for
Will mentioned the Doing Economics from CORE, and. the vast library of videos Sarah alludes to is here. CORE has already mapped lots of Economists and Financial Times articles to the Edexcel spec which you can find here and here respectively.
We mourned the death of Target 2.0
Some other useful data sources we didn't mention:
Our World in Data - really useful data, most of which is interactive, but more importantly the accompanying articles collate useful data together and offer great explanations so make a great backbone for a lesson. There are also some handy teaching materials.
Trading Economics, CIA World Factbook and World Bank all offer large, searchable datasets
UNCTADSTAT, BBC Country Profiles and WorldData.info might also be useful to students doing country case studies
World in Figures from the Economist is useful for 'Top Ten' rankings, comparisons and country profiles as well as the Factquest game
Storyline tests students' understanding of various time series
'What's going on in this graph?' from the NYT is often good for supporting students' interpretation of data
Econ Ed Chat takes place the first Wednesday of the month at 6pm GMT. All welcome.