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Theory of the Firm - Booklet


I've been keenly exploring the booklet concept recently and decided to produce one for microeconomics! I'm really enjoying using this myself and hope you will find it useful too!

This booklet covers basic, core content for the 'theory of the firm' - primarily focused around understanding of cost and revenue diagrams. 

I am using the booklet:

- to reduce the time students spend copying notes - the core content is typed into the booklet, so students just draw the diagrams and annotate the text with their own additional notes/examples. 

- to aid student organisation - all the core diagrams are located in one place.

- alongside other activities - I am adding my own explanations, examples and further activities also (for example, I also gave students: a longer written article on diminishing returns; cost calculation exercises in tables; further notes and examples of economies of scale; a table of the characteristics of market structures etc). I may consider adding more of these elements to the booklet in the future. This is meant to be a core knowledge booklet though, not a complete lesson teaching booklet (it only contains a few questions for further thought/discussion- no practice questions or case studies for example).

- as a foundation - a further booklet to cover efficiency, objectives, curve shifting, adjustments from SR to LR etc is likely to follow.

- with my animated You Tube diagram videos - I play the video clip (which is silent and shows how to draw the diagram) and then talk over it to explain. This has been very useful as I can re-play diagrams multiple times over, and this has also been incredibly useful in enabling me to teach students remotely (I switch between projecting the booklet PDF and the You Tube clips). These clips can be embedded easily into Google Slides presentations. https://www.youtube.com/user/sarahpjonesify/videos

- to keep all students together - with various students out (for self isolation and other reasons), following through a booklet is helping to keep the class together.

- to aid retrieval practice - the final page contains a list which students can use to self-test, then can then check back over the booklet to find the correct diagrams/explanations. 

- to reduce cognitive load - I have carefully designed all diagrams to ensure labels are placed in appropriate places to avoid split attention and reduce extraneous cognitive load. 

- to support teaching of Edexcel Economics A Theme 3 - the content is fairly universal, although I may look to produce further versions to cover other aspects more prominent in other specifications (returns to scale for example).


Teacher booklet PDF download: Download here

Student booklet PDF download: Download here

Please feel free to use in your own teaching context (for example make paper copies for staff/students, upload to VLE/Classroom/Teams). Please seek permission before sharing more widely or publicly though. Thank you. 


I would love to hear your feedback on this - do drop me a DM or tweet - @JonesLearnUK - Thanks! :-)

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