Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Assignment in Macroeconomics

This article shares an assignment that has been successfully implemented in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) macroeconomic courses available to major and non-major undergraduate students enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College. While the outcome at the end of the semester is a paper of about three pages, the steps designed to assist students with completing it are important because they provide a detailed research and investigation guide. The assignment is composed of a series of scaffolded tasks that engage students in data collection, data analysis, and interpretation using economic theory of the subject area, presentation of the actual findings compared to predictions of economic theory, and investigation and interpretation for convergence and/or divergence from the economic theory. This assignment is based on prior research on the benefits of assigning writing in economics courses and aims to achieve the outcomes described by the structure of cognitive process dimension of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl, 2002).