TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Milovanska-Farrington, Stefani
AU  - LaForge, Olivier
AU  - Burton, Jennifer
        TI  - Seeing It in a New Light: Do Cross-Disciplinary Comparisons Make Learning Economic and Financial Concepts Click?
        PY  - 2025/Jun/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 17946
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp17946
        AB  - Analogies can simplify complex new material by relating it to ideas students already know. Making cross-disciplinary connections also makes the material more engaging, accessible and memorable. In this study, we perform a controlled empirical test to examine whether providing cross-discipline analogy examples enhances students’ learning. We find strong evidence of an increase in students’ self-reported understanding of the material and actual performance after exposure to analogies. Students who are less familiar with the concepts prior to the class benefit from the analogy examples the most. About 40% of the students report that examples that cross-reference their major facilitate learning the most, followed by about 25% of the students who find everyday examples the most useful. The findings have implications for the importance of designing a curriculum that prioritizes a cross-disciplinary, holistic approach that allows students to recognize analogies between various fields of study and helps them apply basic principles in various contexts in the future.
        KW  - analogy
KW  - teaching economics
KW  - controlled experiment
KW  - empirical test
KW  - introductory economics
KW  - finance
KW  - teaching finance
        ER  -