The Mentor Demonstration Model: Writing with Students in the Senior Economics Seminar.

The article presents a seminar on the benefits of the teaching of writing-intensive courses in academic education. The senior economics seminar was designed to capture these benefits by incorporating many of those components that nourish economic writing and learning: tight structure, short assignments, multiple drafts, clear expectations, targeted audience, empirical testing, and oral presentations. The goal is for each student to produce a scholarly article worthy of consideration for conference presentation or journal submission. Two of the course's most important features are that the components of the paper are produced in stages and the professor creates his or her own paper along with the students to demonstrate the expected standards of effort and excellence. The seminar tends to work best if the class size is sufficiently small to allow for individual attention. There should be 15 or fewer students. Students should have sufficient background in intermediate theory and economic statistics, including regression analysis, to conduct and interpret hypothesis testing.