Abstract

Economics is usually taught in universities using ‘chalk and talk’ methods to students who are essentially ‘passive’ learners. In contrast, this paper presents a learner-centred classroom experiment that engages as many senses as possible, thereby inspiring students to learn economics in a more active fashion. The experiment – a simple labour market game – uses visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles. This ensures that students who learn by seeing and imagery (the visual learners), by talking and listening (the auditory learners), and by movement and action (the kinaesthetic learners) are each catered for, ensuring the learning capacity of the class overall is expanded. By becoming more active learners students are better able to retain information. We find that the active learning techniques improve student retention of information. This appears to result in improved performance in examinations.