Learning Theory as Teaching Resource: Enhancing Students’ Understanding of Economic Concepts

A group of experienced secondary school teachers used a novel learning theory as a resource for planning and carrying out their teaching of a difficult economic concept. Their students’ mastery of this concept after a series of three lessons was compared with the mastery of the same concept by students who were taught by another group of teachers under the same conditions except for the use of the theory. The difference in learning outcomes was extreme. Observations of what was happening in the classrooms showed subtle but decisive differences correlated with the differences in outcome. These differences were interpreted in terms of the theory used by the first group, and the results seem to give support to the theoretical claim that for any specific object of learning there is a necessary pattern of variation and invariance that the learners must experience in order to appropriate the object of learning in question and thus by bringing out that pattern in the learning situation, the likelihood of that object of learning being appropriated is enhanced. Furthermore, this study shows how the understanding of the simultaneous change in the supply of and the demand for a certain good affects its market price can be brought about in a powerful way.