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The state of our collective knowledge of how students learn is too rudimentary to continue spending resources on a research agenda which will only produce results that provide very little meaningful guidance to practicing teachers. The good efforts that have gone into familiarizing the economics community with innovative teaching techniques now need to be supplemented with research that investigates learning processes with the goal of producing our own research on learning mechanisms rather than being satisfied with being consumers of this type of research from other disciplines.

In my egregious example it is obvious that the written instruction is highly inefficient and imposes a needless cognitive load. Cognitive load theory cautions us to watch out for such instances when we unwittingly might impose excessive load on the learner. Experts who already have a schema for the demand and supply model do not experience the extraneous load, or at least not to the same extent as novices. Cognitive load theory recommends use of worked-out examples instead of problem-solving exercises to aid in the formation of relevant schema when learners have low prior knowledge in the domain.

This reluctance may also be due to instructors falling prey to sunk cost fallacy. My own experience with innovative teaching methods suggests that lack of knowledge of learning theories, rather than a reluctance to disregard sunk costs, is the reason why economists are as yet unwilling to give up on “innovative” teaching. I implemented cooperative learning and context-rich problems in my courses after obtaining training through the Teaching Innovations Workshop. Even after benefiting from the individual feedback and help from workshop faculty, the innovative methods continue to require more of my time and effort than simple lecture-based courses.