The Handbook for Economics Teaching Assistants

Have you done the necessary topic reading and thinking, have you informed yourself of what the students studied in any related lectures and have you thought of some helpful questions to ask and points to make? A course will usually have clear, written course aims and some have more detailed objectives or outcomes. It may then be useful for you to prepare some more specific learning outcomes. A learning outcome\objective is a statement that describes what a student should be able to do or understand after attending the class and completing the associated work assignments. These will clearly inform and help focus your class discussions. Here is an example of a set of learning outcomes from a second year Economics course at the LSE.

Microeconomic Principles

  • understand the working and applications of the standard general equilibrium model;
  • understand the basic elements of welfare economics;
  • know how to apply elementary game theory to microeconomic models of firms;
  • be able to make economic application of equilibrium concepts in multistage games;
  • understand the basic role of uncertainty and imperfect information in analysing economic incentives.