Sheryl Ball

Associate Department Head, Economics
Department of Economics
Virginia Tech
3016 Pamplin Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24073
sball@vt.edu

Phone: 540-231-4349
Fax: 540-231-5097

Background Information

Sheryl Ball is the Associate Department Head and Associate Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. She served as Associate Dean for Curriculum Instruction and Advising in the College of Science from 2004-7. She earned her Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences from Northwestern University in 1991.

Sheryl is a frequent presenter on active learning topics in STEM education at workshops and conferences regionally, nationally, and internationally. Her education research has had three main thrusts. In economics, her work has been on using economics experiments to create active learning exercises and in assessing learning gains from the use of experiments in teaching. Her economic education research has appeared in the American Economic Review as well as other journals. She worked actively with with an NSF IGERT program that trained electrical engineering graduate students in entrepreneurship as well as economic theory needed to create algorithms for smart radios they were developing. Finally, she has worked to find ways to use technology to improve the teaching of economics and other STEM subjects.

Related Pedagogical Projects

Along with Catherine Eckel, Sheryl has worked to develop the Wireless Interactive Teaching System (WITS). WITS was initially developed to allow students in large lecture courses to participate in classroom experiments which previously were only accessible to students in relatively small courses: NSF Grant : Collaborative Research: WITS: A Wireless Interactive Teaching System (DUE-0618646) and Evaluating the Implementation of Participatory Exercises in Large Economics Lecture Classes via Student Interaction with Market Simulations Enabled by Wireless Technology (DUE-0127449).