australasian journal of economics education 13...et al. 1994; lagrone et al. 1996; dellaportas 2006;...
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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
Australasian Journal of Economics Education
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
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,
4 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 5
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.
6 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 7
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
10 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 11
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
12 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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,
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 13
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 ________
14 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 15
Table 3: Mapping of Scenario Statements onto Kohlbergian Stages
Statement
Number
Heinz and the
Drug
Bankruptcy Reimbursement
1 Stage 4 Stage 3 Stage 3
2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 4
3 Stage 2 N Stage 2
4 N Stage 3 Stage 4
5 Stage 3 Stage 5 Stage 5
6 Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 5
7 N Stage 4 Stage 4
8 Stage 6 Stage 5 Stage 2
9 Stage 4 Stage 3 Stage 3
10 Stage 5 Stage 4 Stage 4
11 Stage 3 Stage 2 Stage 6
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
16 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 17
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:
18 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 19
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
20 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 21
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
Probability of group
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
Probability of group
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
22 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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.
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 23
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
24 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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.
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 25
APPENDIX A: EXAMPLE OF COMPLETED QUESTIONAIRE
26 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 27
28 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter
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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Australasian Journal of Economics Education
Volume 13, Number 2, 2016, pp.32-51
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 35
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 37
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.
The Transition from Student to Tutor 39
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 41
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 43
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.
The Transition from Student to Tutor 45
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 47
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
The Transition from Student to Tutor 49
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.
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Discussion on Re-evaluating the Undergraduate Major, Cheltenham, UK:
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Australasian Journal of Economics Education
Volume 13, Number 2, 2016, pp.52-58
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
Book Review – The Heart of Teaching Economics 55
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 &
Book Review – The Heart of Teaching Economics 57
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.