Recognising and Building on Freshman Students’ Prior Knowledge of Economics

Could traditional economics principles courses be underserving students by failing to recognise their extant economics knowledge? In this paper, we describe an evidence-based approach that challenges the dominant paradigm in teaching first-year economics. We first show that incoming undergraduate students have higher than expected levels of economic literacy. We then describe extensions we have made to the breadth and depth of content coverage in our introductory economics course. Finally, we show using international comparisons that these changes were made without a substantial loss of learning of core economics topics, and without disadvantaging students who have no prior high school economics training.