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Read this before you teach...Introduction to Economics (Updated version!)

  • 5 days ago
  • 14 min read

I always think there is a lot riding on the first few weeks: getting to know them, helping them transition from GCSE, setting routines and expectations, identifying students who might be on the wrong course, all whilst simultaneously trying to inspire a love of economics and also get on with the course because there's a crazy amount to teach... it's a tall order.


I've pulled together the best A-Level Economics resources I can find for those first few weeks of term. I've also been working hard on some powerpoints and accompanying booklets for students, which you can read about here, and I've included links to individual videos going through each PowerPoint so that even if you aren't interested in purchasing any new resources, you might still be able to get some ideas or just have a nosey!


This post is getting on a bit now, so I've been back through it and given it a proper spring clean: dead links fixed, a few things that had aged badly taken out, and a handful of newer resources added. You can use the links below to skip to a specific section.


You can use the links below to skip to a specific section:


General Introduction to Economics

The first chapter of Niall Kishtainy's A Little History of Economics is perfect at introducing pretty much all of the topics in this unit whilst also communicating the nature and importance and beauty of the subject, it's almost like it was written for this purpose! (Copying a single chapter is likely to be covered by your school's CLA Education Licence, but the terms vary between licences and have changed since I first wrote this, so it's worth a quick check of your own school's before you get to the photocopier.) This 30-minute podcast from Planet Money also covers many of the topics in a really accessible way.


You might also find Tutor2U's Initial Numeracy Assessment useful in the first few weeks. Worth knowing that a lot of the free Tutor2U downloads in this post now need you to be signed in to a (free) account, which wasn't the case when I first wrote it.


Economic Problem

The Dialysis Machine has been a staple for introducing scarcity in many classrooms for years. I'm not sure of the original author, but the earliest reference I can find is here (that page is an archive now, it hasn't been touched since 2020, but the activity itself is still fine). I recently shared a similar version looking at Vaccine Allocation, and the Economics Observatory piece behind it, Who should be vaccinated first?, is a good read alongside it.

Tutor2U have a free Surviving the Walking Dead activity which needs no prior knowledge, so could work pretty nicely as a starting point (update: did this and students enjoyed it, it was good to get them talking to each other, recommended). OCR have produced this Isle of Economics resource which looks a bit complicated but that you might want to consider too.


I tend to leave Economic Systems until later on, but if you want to get stuck in early on, I really love this podcast from Planet Money to demonstrate the power of free markets. It talks about how foodbanks were being allocated donations they didn't want, and weren't getting what they needed, until a pricing system was introduced. For the other end of the spectrum, this Visual Capitalist map of the world's largest state-owned oil companies is a nice quick visual hook for state ownership. I also like to mention the debate over who the founding father of economics is: Smith? Khaldun? Socrates? Plato? Mun?


Leonard Read's seminal essay, I, Pencil, abridged in this video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, beautifully demonstrates the complex nature of the production of even simple products, like a pencil. It's pretty profound stuff, certainly ticks the 'awe and wonder' box. Accompanying worksheets and discussion points can be found here and here. An alternative is It's a Wonderful Loaf, another amazing poem and video which ponders the existence of a 'bread tsar', highlighting the magnificence of emergent order within markets. Extra resources on that are here.


CORE's whole chapter on economic systems is great, with some interesting questions too. It has moved since I first wrote this: what I originally linked is now archived as The Economy 1.0, and the current edition is The Economy 2.0, where this material sits in Unit 1.




Economic Resources

I don't have too many resources on factors of production. I usually use a table like this to get the info across.



Tutor2U's enterprise card drop activity is a good quick one if you want something a bit more active than a table, and it gives enterprise a bit more airtime than it usually gets.






Opportunity Cost


This article reports that 80% of PhD candidates get an opportunity cost question wrong: you can challenge your students to do better. This video from MRU has been converted into an EdPuzzle which might be useful for homework. If you'd rather have something with a UK policy angle, Tutor2U's Opportunity Cost: Two Applied Examples does the same job using NHS budget constraints and real treatment costs, which tends to land a bit harder than a coffee example.


This article looks at the opportunity cost of picking up a penny (the pay figures in it are a few years old now, but the point stands), pretty much summed up by this XKCD cartoon, which puts a number on nine minutes of your time:






Economic Methodology

This article from the IMF is good on the micro/macro divide, I found it useful from a teacher's point of view but it might be handy for wider reading too.


I love the following quote from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, by Lewis Carroll, to illustrate why models are necessarily simplified. I find students tend to assume that economic models are simple because economists aren't 'good enough', rather than by design...



I also like using these two opposing articles on whether or not economics is a science. On Team Yes is Raj Chetty, a Harvard professor writing for the New York Times. On Team No is Alan Y Wang, student writer for the Harvard Crimson. You can use these in loads of ways: modelling reading and summarising one and getting them to do the other, discussing Op Eds vs balanced articles, or if you like running debates (you're braver than me!), that could work too.


For more on experiments within economics, you might want to point students towards Economics in Ten's episode on Esther Duflo. Other episodes with links to this unit include those on Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun, Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek. There are a few more that have come out since I first wrote this: Alfred Marshall, William Stanley Jevons on the Marginal Revolution, and Paul Samuelson. If you want something that will actually fit inside a lesson, A Short History of Economics in Rhythm and Rhyme is only 19 minutes and has a quiz at the end.


If you've got some keen beans, these two articles (1 and 2) talk in detail about the use of models, but I found them both a little dull. MRU's course on Mastering Econometrics, on the other hand, is excellent. It still hasn't been fully released (I've been saying that for years now), but the videos don't assume knowledge of complicated maths, so whilst students would find it a challenge and probably wouldn't understand everything, I reckon a decent Year 12 student could certainly give it a go to get a flavour of how economists use modelling.


If you'd like sa complete, finished course,, Matt Masten's Causal Inference Bootcamp covers much the same ground in videos of two to five minutes each, free and with no sign-up, and it's explicitly written for sixth formers and first years. For your most able, The Effect by Nick Huntington-Klein is free to read in full (with videos). It's an undergraduate book, so I'd point them at the first few chapters rather than the whole thing, but the causal diagrams are a lovely way of making 'correlation isn't causation' concrete.


For less mathematically minded students, looking at how data can help us in all sorts of interesting ways (and the issues that come with that), perhaps through something like this article on How to Become an Elite Athlete, or a chapter from something like Freakonomics, Super Crunchers, Outliers or Invisible Women, might whet their appetite.


Gapminder's Worldview Upgrader is a good one for this section too. Students guess statistics on things like how many people live in poverty, are routinely miles off, and each misconception gets explained. It makes the point about needing data rather than instinct far better than I can.


Tutor2U have a free activity sorting positive and normative statements. I also like this comic by Tom Toles to demonstrate how very little is simple in econ and the roles of both positive and normative statements:






PPFs

I love this video from Economics Mafia to explain PPFs (/PPCs), although the accent of the narrator has distracted a few of my more immature students in the past. There are all sorts of MCQs out there for this, especially from the US, so searching site:.edu PPF exam usually gives plenty of questions, but just be aware that in the US, PPFs are normally taught in the same unit as comparative advantage so make sure you check over the questions first. There are loads of Kahoots on this topic, but this one is nice and reasonably challenging.


Over time, I've changed how I teach PPFs, focussing on how we model things in economics. Rather than explaining how or why curves shift in and out, I'm going to come from the other direction and explore what happens when we change our assumptions. This is something that I usually do with teaching demand and supply, but never with PPFs.


I have found students usually find it difficult to understand why the PPF is curved. The video above does a good job at explaining this, but at the last EconEdChat I attempted to explain how I have also demonstrated this with footballers, and I didn't do a great job explaining it at the time, so you might want to check out what I mean with the video below.





Specialisation

There are plenty of good resources around for specialisation. I love this video from WeTheEconomy because it shows how specialisation fits into the narrative of the rest of the unit. MRU collects examples of really niche markets to demonstrate how specialisation results in markets for everything, like a carry case for $1m or computer programmes designed to help you buy and sell human bones. I set a challenge to see who can find the most niche product as a starter.


The first few paragraphs from CORE are a nice way to introduce the topic, and along the same lines there is also this TED Talk by Thomas Thwaites documenting his attempt to make a toaster from scratch, and this one by AJ Jacobs about thanking all of the people who played a part in his morning cup of coffee (I particularly like the three minute animated version). In exactly the same spirit, and newer, is How to Make a $1500 Sandwich in Only 6 Months. There's a short overview video and a full playlist covering each stage, so you could set different students different stages of the production process. There's also a response video arguing why chicken sandwiches don't actually cost $1500, which makes a nice evaluation pairing.


It's not a perfect representation of what countries specialise in, but students might be interested to see this map from Visual Capitalist of what each country exports (worth telling them the data is from 2018, so it predates the pandemic and a fair bit of trade upheaval since), or look at what the UK exports.


This article from the Economist gives a brief history of mass production. If you're teaching Smith's Pin Factory, here's a handy link to the relevant passage. The Adam Smith Institute produced a Tour of the Pin Factory which is technically very fancy, but probably more detail on 17th Century pin production than A-Level students need(/want). I use a Pin Factory simulation to demonstrate the benefits of division of labour, and Tutor2U have a Special Cars activity which does a similar job and covers the economic problem and opportunity cost at the same time. Their In the News activity on the division of labour in modern times is a good discussion starter too (both need a free Tutor2U sign-in for the downloads).


MRU have some nice videos on this, including Specialisation Saved My Son's Life and Division of Labour: Burgers and Ships.


There are loads of industries to explore. I like using car production because of Ford's history, and also because there are lots of good factory videos (this tour of the Nissan plant in Sunderland is a good one, and being a UK plant it opens up a conversation about where things are actually made). I pair that with a discussion of specialising in the hairdressing industry because it makes a nice contrast. I like this blog post from a hairdresser who worked in a salon with an unusual set up, where stylists were grouped in pods, and how specialisation helped and hindered. There are all sorts of other options though, you can look through the How It's Made videos for possible ideas. There's an article on Bloomberg about specialisation lowering the cost of healthcare.


Specialisation is possibly a counterargument to the Eat Local movement. It's a topic covered in this Freakonomics blog post and in this MRU video. There is also some nice data on this in Our World in Data, and a much shorter 2024 update which is one chart and three sentences: food miles are about 5% of food system emissions, road transport 3.9% of that and aviation 0.02%. That last figure reliably starts an argument, which is exactly what you want. If you'd rather give students the debate than the conclusion, Hannah Ritchie was interviewed about it on EconTalk and there's a full transcript, so you can lift an extract as a reading rather than setting the whole episode.

There are also a few bits of reading championing Generalisation. This Planet Money article looks at Djokovic, Federer and Tiger Woods, but I prefer this slightly lengthier one from the Economist on the same topic. In a similar vein, there is also this one which talks about 'moving beyond' the 'era of specialisation' in music. (I did read Range by David Epstein in the end, which was an interesting lesson in the power of the generalist!).


For a more current take on how specialised firms have become, the Economics Observatory piece on the hollow corporation looks at how much of what a modern firm does is actually outsourced, using companies students will know. It works here, and again later if you teach theory of the firm. If you want the comparative advantage side of this properly explained, Economics in Ten's episode on David Ricardo does it clearly, which is handy because students usually find it slippery.






Money

For someone who isn't that interested in finance, I do find the concept of money fascinating from an anthropological perspective. Extra History's animated six-part series, The History of Paper Money, is about 50 minutes in total but I'd highly recommend it. If you can't spare 50 minutes, take a flick through this article to see what has been used as money in the past.


I like to introduce the topic by doing a barter activity. I use a pretty basic activity but I recently came across this one as an alternative. Another way I've introduced this in the past is to ask if coconuts would make a good form of money, a technique suggested in a Tutor2U CPD video from way back, which is definitely worth a look. If you're after something more visual, the banknote ranking activity I use at open evenings works nicely here too: print and laminate a set of notes (Bolivars, Pounds, Forint, Euros, Dollars, Yuan, Yen and so on) and get students to put them in order of value.


I also like looking at prison currencies: you might want to check out this video from Vox, this article from NPR or this one from the Guardian. Chapter 3 of Extreme Economies by Richard Davies tells a detailed story of Louisiana's prisons, including how and why currencies change over time.


The polymer notes and the questions over whether or not they are vegan raise an important question about what happens when money isn't 'acceptable' to all. The Bank of England's own decision on the future composition of polymer banknotes is the best thing to read on it, and the full decision document is even better if you want the detail. Of 3,554 responses, 88% of those who answered opposed animal-derived additives, but 48% were also against the palm oil alternative, switching was costed at around £16.5m over ten years and the Treasury said it wouldn't be value for money. So there's no option that keeps everyone happy, which makes it a lovely bit of evaluation practice rather than just a fun fact.


There are a few debates in the world of money that might be worth discussing, starting with whether we should 'get rid' of coppers. This has moved on a lot: the Royal Mint's annual report for 2024-25 says that for the first time it received no order for UK circulating coins from the Treasury at all, across every denomination, not just 1p and 2p. Students can compare that with the headlines, which have a habit of running ahead of what the documents actually say (and watch out that a lot of the 'penny abolished' coverage online is about the US cent, not ours).


On cash more broadly, UK Finance's UK Payment Markets 2025 summary is free and has the figures you want: cash fell to 4.4 billion payments in 2024, under 10% of all UK payments for the first time, and is forecast to be around 4% by 2034. This short video from the Economist makes a good accompaniment. The BBC's Coins, Credit Cards and Bitcoin is a 44-minute listen if you want to send the keen ones away with something.


Since students have never lived in a time without cash machines, it might be useful for them to get an idea of how they shaped society (written for the ATM's fiftieth birthday, so it's a while ago now), and consider what future innovations in finance might do. Students might want to look into cryptocurrencies, but a word of warning that this can become quite complex quite quickly!





Revision

Tutor2U's Revision Blast on this offers a few options: you can download the Powerpoint (bottom of the page, and you'll need to be signed in) and do it in the classroom which should take around 30 minutes, but the video would also work really well as an EdPuzzle. Alternatively you can split the activities up and incorporate them into future lesson starters.


APT have made a set of 30 Scarcity and Choice MCQ questions available as a sample, complete with answers and explanations. I have a full Year 1 Micro set which I really like, the set I have has two tests on each topic, which is useful for using one for revision or retest. The University of Dayton questions I used to link have vanished along with the whole site, but Topic 1 and Topic 2 of this free BCcampus microeconomics book do a similar job (Topic 1 answers, Topic 2 answers). Topic 2 in particular maps nicely onto PPFs, opportunity cost and specialisation.


You can turn them into Google Forms/Microsoft Forms quizzes (for the APT ones, you can even copy and paste the explanations for students to see if they give the wrong answer). However, I have found the quickest way to issue these is to make a generic 30-question form with A, B, C, D answers (so each quiz just says 'Q1' with answers 'A/B/C/D', then 'Q2' with answers 'A/B/C/D' rather than the specific questions and answers) and use this as a template. Each time I want to issue a quiz, I duplicate the form and mark in the correct answers for the quiz I want to give (which takes about 2 minutes). I then just issue the students with the relevant pages of the PDF of the quiz and get students to mark in the corresponding answers. It's a slight extra step for students but it saves me a whole load of copying and pasting.


Tutor2U has topic tests for AQA and Edexcel. You can also check out when these topics have been tested using the free topic trackers (AQA and Edexcel) or find topical examples using the fab free Topical Examples Guide (AQA and Edexcel).


I have updated questions for this unit on Quizlet and on Carousel (if the link doesn't work, just search 'Econosaurus' on the community page). I went through my Edexcel questions and added in anything that was missing from AQA, so you can probably use them for either, but obviously make sure it has everything you want. I also made some printable flashcards which you can see in the video below, along with the flash card mat.


Biz-omics is worth a look too. The diagram flashcards flip between a bare title and a full explanation, and you can print them off to build a diagram bank, plus there's keyword bingo and a searchable definition bank. One thing to know: the PPF diagrams sit under macro rather than micro, so have a hunt before you decide it isn't there.

Just a quick note to add that the Intro to Economics Bundle saves you about £11 on buying the products individually and also includes a few extra resources:






Just a quick note to add that the Intro to Economics Bundle saves you about £11 on buying the products individually and also includes a few extra resources:





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