•Focus on core concepts: Each chapter focuses students’ attention on 3-5 key concepts so students understand how the various details fit back into the larger picture.
•Learn by doing: Foundations of Economics and its accompanying print and online resources are structured to encourage learning by doing. Within the text, a Checklist-Checkpoint system provides a practice-oriented framework:
•Checklists begin each chapter to preview the 3-5 key ideas students need to know, and the chapter is broken into discrete sections devoted to each of those ideas.
•Checkpoints follow each of those sections and provide a full page of practice. Each Checkpoint includes a practice problem with a guided solution and a parallel exercise for the student to try.
•Chapter Checkpoints end each chapter and include a summary of key points and key terms, as well as additional practice opportunities consisting of problems and exercises, news analysis questions, critical thinking questions, and Web exercises that require students to find data and information online to answer discussion questions.
•In-text problems, assignable online in MyEconLab: Bade and Parkin are the only economics authors who write their own content in an online assessment platform. For Foundations of Economics, here are a few examples of what they wrote for Pearson’s online assessment and tutorial system, MyEconLab:
•Checkpoints in the text are available for students to practice online in MyEconLab. Checkpoint problems appear in study mode where students can work them using tutorial learning aids as needed. Checkpoint exercises are available in a self-test mode so students are encouraged to work them independently before getting feedback.
•News Analysis Questions are found in the end-of-chapter material and online in MyEconLab. These questions ask students to interpret a news story then answer related questions that apply economic concepts.
•End-of-chapter problems and exercises are also developed as auto-graded questions in MyEconLab. Instructors can assign end-of-chapter problems online–even problems with graphing, fill-in-the-blank, and numerical entries.
•Economics in the News is updated every day during the school year by the authors themselves. Each entry provides a summary of the news, a link to the complete story, and discussion questions.
•Additional learning tools include audio-narrated animations, interactive graphs, customized feedback, and guided solutions.
•Instructors can encourage students to practice—without needing to grade by hand—by using MyEconLab.
•Professors can choose how much time—or how little—they want to spend setting up the course. View a sample of how instructors use MyEconLab here.
•Computer-graded graphing exercises help students become more comfortable and proficient working with economic graphs and models.
•Online homework, quizzes, and tests are easy to assign, allowing instructors to build assessments using a mix of MyEconLab-specific problems, Test Bank questions, and questions written by the instructor using the Econ Exercise Builder.
•A robust gradebook tracks students’ performance on online homework, quizzes, tests, and problems worked in the Study Plan.
•Supplements are reliable and easy to use because they align with the same Checklist-Checkpoint structure found in the text. A complete suite of instructor supplements is available, including an Instructor’s Manual, a new Solutions Manual, three Test Banks, PowerPoint® lecture slides, and an Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM.
•Test Bank questions include graphing questions and integrative questions in each chapter.
•All components of the supplements are organized by Checkpoint topic so students can move easily through the textbook, MyEconLab, and the Study Guide, and instructors can navigate among the textbook, MyEconLab, the PowerPoint lecture slides, the Instructor’s Manual, and the Test Banks.
•Three separate Test Banks are available, with more than 12,000 multiple-choice, numerical, fill-in-the-blank, short-answer, and essay questions, plus integrative questions that build on material from more than one Checkpoint and more than one chapter.
•The Test Bank authors also wrote questions for the Study Guide to ensure consistency.
•News analysis and data-driven problems at the end of each chapter include:
•News-based end-of-chapter questions that give news summaries and ask students to apply economics to the news.
•Web exercises that ask students to seek out real data on the web and use it to answer questions.
•Modern micro and macro topics are presented at an accessible level that uses contemporary examples to tie theory into the real world.