There are concept inventories in a lot of fields, but these vary in quality and usefulness. The most well-known of these is the Force Concept Inventory for first semester mechanics, which basically aims to test how Aristotelian/Newtonian a student’s thinking is. Any physicist can point out a dozen problems with it, but it seems to very roughly measure what it claims to measure.
Russ Roberts (host of the podcast EconTalk) likes to talk about the “economic way of thinking” and has written and gathered links about ten key ideas like incentives, markets, externalities, etc. But he’s relatively libertarian, so the ideas he chose and his exposition will probably not provide a very complete picture. Anyway, EconTalk has started asking discussion questions after each podcast, some of which aim to test basic understanding along these lines.
There are concept inventories in a lot of fields, but these vary in quality and usefulness. The most well-known of these is the Force Concept Inventory for first semester mechanics, which basically aims to test how Aristotelian/Newtonian a student’s thinking is. Any physicist can point out a dozen problems with it, but it seems to very roughly measure what it claims to measure.
Russ Roberts (host of the podcast EconTalk) likes to talk about the “economic way of thinking” and has written and gathered links about ten key ideas like incentives, markets, externalities, etc. But he’s relatively libertarian, so the ideas he chose and his exposition will probably not provide a very complete picture. Anyway, EconTalk has started asking discussion questions after each podcast, some of which aim to test basic understanding along these lines.