Seeing it in a new light: do cross-disciplinary comparisons improve understanding of economic and financial concepts?

Purpose 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. This study aims to perform a controlled empirical test to examine whether providing cross-disciplinary analogy examples enhances students’ learning. Design/methodology/approach The authors first teach four concepts in the “conventional” way as typically taught in introductory economics and finance courses. Then, for each concept, the authors ask students how well they think they understand the concept and give them one test question related to the concept to gauge their actual understanding of the concept that was taught. Then, the authors provide analogous examples extracted from other disciplines and everyday life related to the concept. Finally, students complete a second survey similar to the first one. The goal is to determine whether the analogies have improved students’ self-perceived understanding of the material. Findings The authors 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. Originality/value Literature provides practical examples of analogies that could be easily incorporated into the classroom, but acknowledges that the effectiveness of these learning techniques remains to be tested (Franz, 2020). The authors fill this gap in the literature by exploring whether students’ perceived and actual understanding of economic and financial concepts increases between an initial presentation of a concept using discipline-specific language and a subsequent presentation of that same concept using analogous everyday examples and examples from other disciplines.