Teaching Contingent Valuation and Promoting Civic Mindedness in the Process

Economics majors are often assumed to lack civic mindedness. The purpose of this paper then is to demonstrate how by engaging students in the proper understanding of contingent valuation (CV) methodology and by evaluating a social service, we can improve student outcomes in two areas: increasing their competence in research design as well as in the process teaching them to consider the more unfortunate. Since students are really learning by doing in this prescribed process, the attractiveness of the teaching methodology is that the instructor substitutes direct learning and instruction on research design for one where students learn much of the subject matter through experimentation. This paper articulates the experiences of conducting a CV exercise with 49 second- and third-year economics students from the National University of Singapore (in the Environmental Economics course) during the month of October 2001.