Using Cultural Diversity in Teaching Economics: Global Business Implications

Globalization and increasing cross-cultural interactivity have implications for education in general and may also present valuable pedagogical opportunities in the practice of teaching economics for business students. Therefore, the author investigated this proposition and offers some empirical observations from research and teaching experiments. In this article, the author describes a procedure for using cultural-diversity measures in teaching economic principles courses. The author performed experiments to test the impact of a teaching approach that explicitly includes cultural-diversity measurements in classroom discussions and statistically tested student-learning outcomes using this approach. The findings support the contention that a valuable opportunity exists to enhance traditional teaching approaches by introducing measures of cultural diversity. The author concludes with analytical comments and suggestions for further research.