  The goal of this paper is to investigate the importance of providing visual
"big pictures" in the teaching of economics. The plurality and variety of
concepts, variables, diagrams, and models involved in economics can be a source
of confusion for many economics students. However, reviewing the existing
literature on the importance of providing visual "big pictures" in the process
of learning suggests that furnishing students with a visual "big picture" that
illustrates the ways through which those numerous, diverse concepts are
connected to each other could be an effective solution to clear up the
mentioned mental chaos. As a practical example, this paper introduces a "big
picture" that can be used as a good resource in intermediate macroeconomics
classes. This figure presents twenty-seven commonly-discussed macroeconomic
diagrams in the intermediate macroeconomics course, and gives little detail on
some of these diagrams, aiming at helping students to get the whole picture at
once on a single piece of paper. This macroeconomics big picture mostly focuses
on the routes through which common diagrams in macroeconomics are connected to
each other, and finally introduces the general macroeconomic equilibrium that
is graphically derived through those connections.
