Brad Cartwright

If you’ve been following me for a while you know that I have spent a lot of time thinking about which skills are essential to student success on the IB Economics Exam.

I talk about them in every IB Economics Teacher Workshop.

They are the foundation of my belief that our role as IB teachers is to teach skills.

So, what are they?

The Five Essential Skills of IB Economics

• The Language
• The Calculations
• The Diagrams
• The Analysis
• The Evaluation

But which two are the most important skills for student success?

I get asked this quite a bit.  My answer is always the same.

Easy.

It’s the language and the diagrams.

I’ll explain my thoughts in a second, but first, let’s get a solid understanding of each.

The Language

The language is a fancy way of saying the vocabulary of the course.

These are the words that students need to use in order to write and communicate like economists.

Embedded in the list of vocabulary is literally every economic theory, every key concept, every solution to market failures, to the macroeconomic goals of governments, even the reasoning behind free trade and protectionism.  

If a student is a vocabulary wizard, they can write well-informed, robust, mark-scheme-earning analyses and evaluations.

So, how do you teach it?

Teach the language often.   

Meaning every single day. 

If IB Economics students can't talk the talk of being an economist, they are lost from the get-go.

So, how are you going to do this?  Simple.  

Literally, simply.   

Create a separate list of Key Terms and Concepts for every chapter of the IB Economics curriculum.  Use the IB Glossary of Economic Terms as your guide.  

Don't get fancy.  

As I used to say to my students "Look, we're going 6th grade memorization mode here."   There is a time for rote memorization.  Quiz them often.  

My model is this:

     - Create the list of Key Terms and Concepts.

     - Hand it out on day one of every unit.

     - Quiz twice a unit on known days (don't do pop quizzes, they're stupid).

     - The quiz is just five terms.  No word bank.  No matching.

     - Answers must be in complete sentences.

This is 6th grade stuff.  But it's about language acquisition.  

Learning IB Economics is like learning a new language.  This is how you learn a second or third language.  You start with memorizing words, and you build from there.  

So, go 6th grade mode, and know that you are preparing them for excellence on the IB Exam.

Mastery of the language is critical to student success on the exams.   

So, that’s the first important skill for student success.  

Mastery of the diagrams is the second critical skill for students to hone.   

The Diagrams

As I have said over and over and over and over because I believe it so deeply, teach IB Economics through the diagrams. 

It’s all about the diagrams.  

I teach them as the cheat sheets that lead to all the other skills.  

Being able to effectively draw the diagrams is the most important of the Five Essential Skills we teach in IB Economics.   If taught well, they literally tell the story of the economic situation that we are trying to analyze and evaluate. 
 
 Here's my teaching strategy

Teach the base diagrams.   Teach the base diagrams.  Teach the base diagrams.  

Until mastery.

The reason is that nearly all of the 90+ diagrams taught in IB Economics are born of these 7 base diagrams:

 

• Microeconomics – Base Diagrams 
  • Demand & Supply Diagram – “Rule of 11” 
  • Market Failure Base Diagram – it’s just a renamed “Rule of 11”

 

• Market Power – Base Diagrams 
  • Price Taker’s Profit Diagram
  • Price Maker’s Profit Diagram

 

• Macroeconomics – Base Diagrams
  • Neoclassical Aggregate Demand & Aggregate Supply Diagram - “Rule of 10”
  • Keynesian Aggregate Demand & Aggregate Supply Diagram - “Rule of 9”

 

• The Global Economy International Economics – Base Diagram
  • The Free Trade Diagram

Add “an event” (a shift of one of the curves) to each of these base diagrams, and you will have the indirect tax diagram, the per-unit subsidy diagram, the demand-pull inflation diagram, the protective tariff diagram, etc.

This technique moves kids away from memorization and towards truly understanding how these diagrams behave. 

So, diagrams, diagrams, diagrams, diagrams.

The Big Take Away

But so what?  Why are these two skills the most important of the Five Essential Skills?

Because if a student knows all of the language of the course, and not only how to draw but also how every diagram in the course behaves, then they will be able to write excellent analyses and evaluations.   

Just run that through your head for a second.

An analysis is essentially pulling economic information from their head to interpret a diagram that they are looking at.  If they are vocabulary experts, that’s going to be easy.

An evaluation is an in-depth look at possible solutions to economic policy.  It must provide a “round” answer to the question.  Quite literally every single solution to any economic situation is a vocabulary word too.  

So, if you had to focus on only two of the Five Essential Skills, choose the language and the diagrams.

I hope you found that helpful!

See you next week.