TEACHING TECHNIQUES IN INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS CLASSROOMS: HOW MUCH OF WHAT? Shahidul Islam Grant MacEwan University ABSTRACT: This paper describes five teaching tools, in-class experimentation and demonstration, frequent quizzing, in-term student feedback, type of questions in exams and playing music before class, for improving teaching and learning in introductory economics classes. Results of implementing these teaching tools were discussed, and literature relevant to such teaching tools was reviewed. It was concluded that these and similar other teaching tools are helpful to improve teaching and learning but implementing these tools require instructor‟s additional knowledge, time and effort. How much of what tool an instructor would implement depends on his/her willingness and affordability. The instructor also needs to weigh the benefits with the additional efforts needed. INTRODUCTION Finding an appropriate manner of teaching introductory economics courses has been a challenging task. During the last several decades, many techniques and procedures have been tried to improve teaching and learning effectiveness (Siegfried et al., 1996; Finegan and Siegried, 1998; Walstad, 2006; Buckles and Siegfried, 2006; Van Der Merwe, 2006; Hawtrey, 2007; Sawler, 2007; Mitchell, 2008). Introductory economics courses have traditionally been considered dry, boring and less relevant to daily life situations by students although instructors in classrooms regularly claim that economics deals with ordinary business of life, and as such it cannot be anything but relevant to real life situations. Recently, Cohen and Howe (2010) published an introductory textbook with the objective to show first year post secondary students how economics concepts can be regularly used to make appropriate decisions. Teaching economics principles with appropriate applicability to real life situations has problems in several fronts. Students in their late teens or early twenties have limited exposure to the real life economic situations, and in many times, they find economic principles contrary and counter intuitive to their typical thinking. Real world economic problems are complex involving many variables which are difficult to define and quantify and are full of uncertainties. Examples that most instructors and textbooks present in introductory classes are often overly simplified versions of complex real world situations with the incorporation of numerous assumptions. The more assumptions are incorporated to explain a complex real world situation, the wider are the deviations of the explanations become from the real world situation. In addition to the inherent nature of complex economic problems, economics teachings are often regarded as poor relative to other disciplines (Becker and Watts, 1999). Becker (1997, 2002) even related lower attention to