The Senior Project: Using the Literature of Distinguished Economists

Senior capstone experiences can serve multiple purposes. Properly designed, they can assist students who are about to graduate to reflect on their baccalaureate journey, integrate general education with their major field of study, and demonstrate their mastery of disciplinary methods, oral and written communication skills, and critical thinking. Senior experiences are offered in several alternative formats, including the senior honors thesis, but honors theses are not necessarily appropriate for all students or all institutions. We introduce here another alternative: an active-learning project in which senior economics majors, guided by a team of faculty mentors, research topics linking the works of distinguished economists (e.g., selected Nobel laureates in economics and American Economic Association [AEA] presidents) with important objectives of general education. Such projects require majors to use their disciplinary skills to read, interpret, and apply original seminal contributions to the field; to contrast economic perspectives with the perspectives of other disciplines; to appraise the contributions and limitations of alternative ways of knowing; and to demonstrate their oral and written communication skills in a final assessment before graduation. We advocate such an approach as one of several options that could be made available to senior economics majors as a capstone exercise. We provide sample curriculum materials for those faculty who might wish to implement such a program and review recent literature critical of baccalaureate education in general and the economics major in particular. We then describe the senior project developed for economics majors at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE). We provide an example from an annotated bibliography that includes biographies of selected laureates and AEA presidents, lists of their selected works accessible to most undergraduates, and suggested topics for senior projects relating their works to issues addressed in general education. (The bibliography is available on request from the authors.)