Innovations in Economic Education

Promising Practices for Teachers and Students, K–16

Mary Beth Henning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317413226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Innovations in Economic Education addresses the growing issue of financial illiteracy by showing how economics can be successfully integrated into classrooms from kindergarten through higher education. Pre-service teachers, experienced educators, curriculum leaders, parents, and school administrators will find practical ideas to improve economic understanding. At the elementary level, the book provides creative ways of introducing young students to the basic concepts of economics, financial justice, and social action. For higher grade levels, the book offers ideas to integrate economics into current history, civics, and math curricula. The final portion of the book features recommendations by leading economic educators on how economics can play a greater role in teachers' professional development. The pedagogical tools presented in each chapter include lesson plans and practical insights, and are designed to meet the NCSS, C3 Framework, and Common Core State Standards for Social Studies. This book is a timely and valuable resource for all educators interested in improving their students' economic literacy and financial decision-making.

1

Introduction

Promising Economic Education Practices from the Past to the Present

Mary Beth Henning

Economic education has a storied history, and several outstanding historical reviews have been written detailing the state of the field. This chapter provides an update to those histories in order to contextualize the specific strategies, methods, and resource recommendations that follow in the rest of this book.

Many begin the history of the field of economic education with the report of the National Task Force on Economic Education in 1961 (Hansen, 1982; Walstad, 1992; Wentworth & Hansen, 1977). The recommendations from that report provide a framework for examining the state of instruction, curriculum materials, standards, and teacher education for economics. This chapter will focus on those elements of economic education over the last 40 years. When available, a brief review of research that has shown effective practices in past and present economic education will be included in this chapter.

This historical overview will show that the centrality of economics to the curriculum has always been contested, some economic educators have always considered information technologies as teaching tools, and active learning strategies have been part of teachers’ tool kits throughout the decades. Walstad’s (1992) comprehensive review of the history of high-school economic education from 1960 to 1990 included a salient quote from Paul Samuelson, who, when reflecting after nearly 30 years on his work on the 1960 committee, stated that economic education was a rock that “has to be rolled up the hill again, and here you all are struggling with the perpetual problem of curricular coverage” (p. 2035). Economic educators have promoted a variety of curriculum guides, standards, and nationally normed assessments over the last four decades. Despite perennial calls for integrating economics with other disciplines, the need for teaching economics always seem to compete with time devoted to mathematics, reading, and other mandates.

Saunders (2012) has written an excellent history of economic education, focusing on leading organizations’ activities related to economic education, specifically examining the American Economic Association (AEA), the Joint Council on Economic Education ( JCEE), and the National Association of Economic Education (NAEE). Each of these organizations has sponsored task forces, committees, journals, books, and research. Although all of these organizations continue to be relevant today, they are not the focus of this chapter. Most historical overviews focus on what has been done at the high-school level to improve economic education, but this chapter will include elementary, middle, and teacher education as well. Others (Davies & Brant, 2006; Hoyt & McGoldrick, 2012) have written about economic practices in more international contexts, but all the contributors to this book focus on their work in the United States. Readers may find that the following history and the subsequent book chapters have lessons for their own contexts and spark some deeper understanding of present and future possibilities in economic education.

The 1970s and 1980s: The First Formal Curriculum Guide and Tests for Economics

Popular Curriculum and Instructional Models

The 1970s and 1980s provided some of the first research-based resources for teaching economics, videos were heavily promoted, active learning strategies were supported, and high-school textbooks were improving. The New Social Studies movement influenced economics with its focus on teaching children important economic concepts in an age-appropriate and experiential way (Armento, 2010).

In the 1970s and 1980s, many curriculum offerings emerged from the JCEE (later to be called the National Council on Economic Education and then the Council on Economic Education). Several video series such as Trade-offs (1978), Free to Choose (Friedman, Latham, Filkin, & Massey, 1980), and Give & Take (1978) were produced by the JCEE. Trade-offs and the Adventure Economics Series (Light, 1975) were popular videotape programs for 9–13-year-olds (Kourilsky, 1987). Give and Take was for older students. At the time, the favored information technologies were television and video programs, both of which improved student understanding of economics and students’ attitudes toward economics (Walstad, 1980). The JCEE produced the first national economic computer program, Income, Outcome, in 1986, shortly after desktop computers emerged as consumer goods (Council for Economic Education, 2014).

Play Dough Economics was published with engaging and cognitively challenging ideas for using play dough to teach economic concepts to young children (Day, 1988). Mini-Society (grades 3–6) and Kinder-Economy (K–2) were developed by Marilyn Kourilsky (1983) to help teachers set up classroom economies. Children learned ideas such as scarcity and distribution of goods from establishing classroom or school stores. Using children’s literature and classic literature became more popular for teaching economics to young children and adolescents (Nappi, Moran, & Berdan, 1973; Watts & Smith, 1983). Engaging stories captivate children as they consider principles of economic decision-making, such as trade-offs and long-term and short-term consequences.

Economic educators began recognizing that educational psychology could inform how economics was presented to young students (Schug, 1986; 1990). The key to all K–12 curriculum is developmental appropriateness (Miller, 1988a). Even the youngest children can begin to understand economic concepts and processes as long as the material is presented at a level that matches their ability to comprehend (Kourilsky, 1987; Miller, 1988a). The need for specialization and problems of scarcity could be made concrete and relevant to children in their classrooms; programs such as Mini-Society (Kourilsky, 1983) and Lifegames (Barr, 1985) provided developmentally appropriate ways of introducing such key economic terms and ideas. More experiential curriculum and instruction was heavily promoted during these decades (Kourilsky, 1982).

The Federal Reserve and Junior Achievement began promoting economic curriculum in the schools more heavily during the 1970s and 1980s. Congressional testimony by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 1982 reported that the Fed was providing “staff to elementary schools to assist teachers in developing materials on economic issues generally and on the role of the Federal Reserve particularly” (U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 102). The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis had developed and distributed over 3,500 copies of an instructional unit on consumer credit to high schools and adult education programs (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982). In 1975, Junior Achievement started sending volunteers into classrooms for the first time with their Project Business for middle school (Junior Achievement USA, n.d.), but they were mostly focused on work readiness and entrepreneurship, not necessarily teaching the fundamentals of economics.

These were the decades when the Stock Market Game was introduced and started to grow in popularity. High-school students, then later junior-high students, were encouraged to invest an imaginary portfolio into stocks and track their progress. Depending on the context, this may or may not have centered on teaching key economic concepts. The JCEE published discrete units such as Energy/Ecology/Economics (Campbell, 1980) to help teachers and their students explore the economics essential to understanding the oil crisis and environmental changes.

Despite the growing number of promising curriculum resources available for K–12 students and teachers, state surveys in the late 1970s found that “insufficient time” was the greatest barrier to teaching economics (Walstad & Watts, 1985). A nationwide emphasis on getting back to “basic” subjects, such as math and reading, crowded out meaningful infusion of economics into the school curriculum (Walstad & Watts, 1985). While the dominant method for teaching economics was infusion in other social studies classes (Walstad, 1992; Walstad & Watts, 1985), most teachers avoided teaching concepts that they didn’t understand well, such as opportunity cost and trade-offs (Seiter, 1989; Walstad & Watts, 1985). High-school teachers covered concepts such as inflation or supply and demand within history classes (Walstad & Watts, 1985). But, this did not seem to be enough. Textbooks in history, sociology, and government presented misconceptions of economics to high-school students (Main, 1978; Miller, 1988a; 1998b). For example, history textbooks would often cite incorrect causes of the Great Depression (Miller, 1988a). However, it appeared that by the 1980s, economics textbooks, which were heavily influenced by the Framework for Teaching Basic Economic Concepts K–12, were having a positive effect on high-school students’ economic knowledge (Miller, 1988a). Twelfth-grade economics textbooks presented almost all economics concepts from the Framework “correctly” or accurately, according to reviews done by New York and Georgia Councils for Economic Education (Miller, 1988a).

Standards and Assessment

The 1970s and 1980s were decades when standards and assessments expanded along with curriculum development. Building on its very first guidelines for curriculum written in 1961, the JCEE published its groundbreaking Framework for Teaching Basic Economic Concepts K–12 (for grades 4, 8, and 12) in 1977 (Saunders, Bach, Calderwood & Hansen, 1984). The fundamental concepts included in the Framework have generally stayed stable over the last 40 years. Revised in 1984, the Framework for Teaching Basic Economic Concepts K–12 suggested that fundamental economic concepts (such as scarcity and opportunity costs), microeconomic concepts (such as markets and prices), macroeconomic concepts (e.g., unemployment and inflation), international economic concepts (such as absolute and comparative advantage), measurement concepts (e.g., tables and index numbers), and broad social goals (such as economic freedom and economic efficiency) should provide the basis for K–12 economics instruction.

The Framework for Teaching Economic Concepts did not explicitly include financial literacy concepts. Buckles (1987) clearly states that financial literacy is not economic education. In his careful definition of economic education, he brackets budgeting, saving, and stock market knowledge as outside the strict purview of economics. Economics is really a method of thinking, much as Wolla and Barnett argue in Chapter 5 of this book and Harrison, Clark, and Schug also explain in Chapter 6. Buckles (1991) also suggested that the Framework represented the general consensus of what mainstream economists believe should be taught in the schools.

In 1964, the JCEE published the first nationally normed standardized test for economics, called the Test of Economic Understanding (Stalnacker et al., 1964). Influenced by the Framework for Teaching Basic Economic Concepts, the test was updated ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• EResources
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Promising Economic Education Practices from the Past to the Present
• 2 Simulation to Promote Citizenship and Economic Education in Elementary Education
• 3 Teaching for Economic Literacy and Economic Justice with and through the Arts
• 4 Home and School Connections to Inspire Children’s Economic Thinking
• 5 Math and History Connections for Middle-School Economics
• 6 Teaching and Measuring the Economic Way of Thinking
• 7 Teaching Economics within the Multimedia Landscape
• 8 Use Econ Lowdown, FRASER®, FRED, and GeoFRED to Top the Standards
• 9 Fostering Economic Literacy for K–12 Students through the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework
• 10 Preparing Elementary Teachers to be Economic Educators: An Overview of ECON 21900, a Hybrid Economics Course for Elementary Teacher Candidates
• Conclusion
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Index