Do You Need a Textbook to Teach High School Economics?

Economics is a discipline about how people interact, so we think students learn it best when they get to interact too. That idea guides how we design our lessons, and it's one of the reasons the Econiful curriculum doesn't pair with a textbook.

Why the Econiful Curriculum Doesn't Use a Textbook

The Econiful curriculum is built around literacy-targeted instruction, active learning, and performance-based assessment, which is why it doesn't pair with a textbook.

For most students, their high school economics class will be the only economics course they take. About six in 10 high school graduates take an economics course, and research on college students finds that many never do. That's why we follow a literacy-targeted approach, which goes deeper on fewer topics, and early research suggests it works well. Studies at the University of Toronto and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that a literacy-targeted course helps students who won't take another economics course without hurting students who go on to major in economics. The most commonly used high school economics textbooks, such as Economics: Principles in Action from Pearson, Economics: Principles and Practices from Glencoe, and Krugman's Economics for the AP Course, aren't written with that approach in mind. The same goes for Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw, one of the most adopted textbooks for college-level principles courses, which is frequently used in AP classes too.

Class time is precious! Reading a textbook is an individual, passive activity, and research on active learning points to the power of simulations, discussions, writing, and applying ideas. You can find arguments for active learning at FRE.org, and our Guiding Principles document cites the research behind our approach. Lesson 4.2: Exploring How Institutions Shape Prosperity is just one example of active learning in our curriculum. Students take the role of a startup and see firsthand how institutions of varying quality affect their success. Simulations, hands-on activities, and games appear frequently in our curriculum, see Lessons 2.3: Introduction to Firms, 3.6: Thinking About the Labor Force Like an Economist, and 5.4: Why Credit Scores Matter for Your Future for a handful of additional examples.

Studying from a textbook has limits as well. Skimming a chapter for keywords and highlighting them right before an assessment isn't very effective, as this video on research-backed study methods explains.

Assessments follow the same logic. Our performance-based assessments (PBA) ask students to apply the principles they’ve learned. Two of our favorites include Lesson 2.9: Analyzing a Product Market and Lesson 5.12: Planning for Future You, however, all of our units contain PBAs. A chapter-and-quiz model, like that encouraged by a textbook, would not support students’ in transferring what they’ve learned to outside the classroom. 

When a Textbook Can Still Help in a High School Economics Classroom

A textbook can still help students catch up after an absence, give you more examples to draw from, and offer a perspective different from your own.

All of that said, textbooks can still serve as a valuable resource in classrooms. Students who have been absent can use one to fill in gaps while they review lesson resources on your learning management system. You can use one to build your own content knowledge, since it can offer additional examples and different ways to frame an idea. We also build additional content support for newer teachers into the notes section of our lesson slides. A textbook can also add balance if you reference examples from a text with a different theoretical emphasis or set of assumptions than your own.

The College-Level Textbooks We Use as References

Before writing each unit, we wanted to know the field well, so we turned to a handful of college-level textbooks as references. None of them are widely used as a core text in an on-level high school course, so we read them to build our own knowledge.

We liked to refer to Principles of Economics by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers when we were deciding how to frame or explain an idea. It's built around four core principles, the same four our curriculum is structured around, and it uses contemporary examples. It is the only textbook that made us laugh out loud while reading and even includes a photo of the authors' dog (a quick way to our hearts).

The Economy from CORE Econ is free and open access, so cost isn't a barrier, and it was built to include inequality, sustainability, and real-world data. Voices on the Economy by Amy S. Cramer and Laura Markowitz is also available in full online at no monetary cost.

Economics Books for High School Students Beyond the Textbook

Of course, reading still matters in a classroom. After all, all teachers are literacy teachers. Plenty of trade books explain economic concepts in an accessible, often funny way, and excerpts from these make strong supplementary reading in an introductory course. Below are some of our favorites:

• How to Teach Economics to Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction by Rebecca Campbell and Anthony McGowan follows the authors' dog, Monty, who learns an economic lesson on a walk in each chapter. We have an activity inspired by the book.
• Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan is a reader-friendly, graph-free introduction with real-world examples.
• The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas by Robert Frank presents strange everyday phenomena and then shows how economics explains them.
• The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume I: Microeconomics by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman is an illustrated introduction to microeconomics with a healthy dose of humor.
• The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy by Tim Harford is written as a witty conversation between the reader and the author about macroeconomic issues.

Books can build your own knowledge and give students more to read, and we're glad to point you to a few. But what we want students to take from the course is the ability to apply economic ideas well, and that comes from practice, so our lessons give class time to simulations, discussions, and writing where students work through ideas with one another.

Megan Kirts

Executive Director  ·  Econiful

Megan Kirts is the Executive Director of Econiful and a veteran economics educator with nearly two decades in the field. A former high school social studies teacher, with a Master's in Economics Education and Entrepreneurship from the University of Delaware, she currently serves as Director of the University of Arizona Office of Economic Education and as an Instructor and Curriculum Developer at 3rd Decade, and brings that experience directly into everything Econiful builds.

Kathleen Cusack

Curriculum Director  ·  Econiful

Kathleen is a curriculum director at Econiful with over 8 years of classroom experience teaching economics at the high school level. She was named Catalina Foothills School District Teacher of the Year for 2019-2020 and holds a Master's in Economics Education and Entrepreneurship from the University of Delaware. Her work at Econiful focuses on designing standards-aligned, evidence-based economics curriculum that builds genuine content mastery.