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Phil Ruder
Pacific University
Professor Ruder earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and has been teaching at Pacific University since that year. Phil's teaching interests include applied microeconomics, environmental economics, health economics, and international trade and development. In recent years, he has adopted the team-based learning (TBL) student-centered pedagogy.
Phil began teaching with TBL in the Spring of 2014. In the early going, he relied on modified end-of-chapter, usually highly computational, exercises for the TBL application exercises (AEs). While these activities were probably more effective at lecturing, they fell far short of the significant conceptual problems that form the basis of the best TBL AEs.
In recent years, Phil has worked to shift the AEs in all his courses away from the computational end-of-chapter problems and toward conceptually rich significant TBL AEs. At the same time, Phil has coordinated an effort to gather and disseminate AEs written by other college economics teachers. This effort got a big boost in the form of an NSF grant to support TBL AE development, dissemination of TBL pedagogy and materials to college teachers, and an empirical assessment of the efficacy of rich conceptual AEs relative to computational exercises for promoting student learning of economics.
Website Content Contributions
Activities (14)
Rising firm production costs part of Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics:Teaching Methods:Team-Based Learning:Activities
Students read an article before class and then complete a guided worksheet on the technical model of competitive markets and firms. The AE asks student teams to make their own predictions about long-run events in ...
Other Contributions (3)
Short-run production function examples part of Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics:Teaching Methods:Team-Based Learning:Activities
Upon completion of this application exercise, each student should be able to describe the typical short-run production process of a firm and explain the concept of diminishing marginal product accurately.
Phil Ruder part of Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics:Teaching Methods:Team-Based Learning:Project Participants
Professor of Economics Pacific University 2043 College Way Forest Grove, OR 97116 ruder@pacificu.edu Phone:503-352-2148 Background Information Phil Ruder, Professor of Economics Professor Ruder earned his Ph.D. in ...
Team-Based Learning part of Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics:Teaching Methods:Team-Based Learning
Team-based learning (TBL) improves student learning through a structured, evidence-based, whole-course framework designed around a five-stage "readiness assurance" process (RAP) and a series of classroom-based "application exercises" (AES) that require teams of students to solve, discuss, and report out solutions to relevant, significant problems.