Introduction
Course Organization
This course consists of eight lessons and two exams. Each lesson is composed of the following five parts:
- You’ll find a set of objectives at the beginning of each lesson. Carefully look over these when you begin because they will give you a preview of the lesson. Upon completing the lesson, review the objectives to make sure that you understand each one. If you feel that you don’t have a good grasp of the objectives, you should do some review or additional study.
- Each lesson’s reading assignment comes from Roger L. Miller’s Economics: Today and Tomorrow. Each chapter of this excellent textbook is skillfully written to make your understanding of the topics meaningful. The textbook includes chapter big ideas, case studies, study tools, special readings, lists of key terms, summaries, and review sections. Since the textbook is the foundation upon which you will build your knowledge, be sure you carefully read and review it. Reviews at the end of each textbook section and the Assessments and Activities at the end of each chapter are “self‑tests,” ways of checking to make sure you’ve understood the material presented in the textbook. Do not send your answers to the textbook reviews and assessments to your instructor. They are for your own review.
- A short discussion of the lesson introduces you to the topics we’ll study. Always read the discussion before you do the textbook reading assignment. The discussion is designed to give you some background information, to clarify points that may help you to better understand the textbook reading, and to give you a sense of the topics you will need to focus on in the reading and in the assignment. Some students do not consider the discussion important, so they totally overlook it. Unfortunately, there are times when I will present an economic concept in the discussion, and if you don’t read about it there, you won’t have the slightest idea of what “we” are talking about when you see it in an assignment or on an exam.
- Your textbook publisher has provided a wealth of online study tools and resources for you to use as you read. At the Economics Today and Tomorrow website you can find quizzes to test yourself on the reading material, puzzles, charts and links to relevant materials and economic news sources. While these activities are not required for this course, they are an easy way for you to review the textbook material, which will help you succeed in the assignments and exams.
- Finally, you will submit a two-part assignment for grading. You can find the assignment by clicking on the assignment link on the course syllabus. For each assignment, you will open a Word document, save it to your computer, answer the questions in the document, save the document, and submit it for grading. The first part of the assignment consists of brief questions for you to answer. The second part is a “Living Economics” exercise, which gets you a little more personally involved with the course material. You’ll find that the length and types of questions in the assignment vary from lesson to lesson. The material you read in the textbook will help you answer most of the questions. There may be times, however, when you need to refer to other sources of information. You’ll also find occasions when you will be expected to take a position and draw conclusions based on your ideas and perceptions of economic issues.
