Teacher workshops chip away at economic illiteracy
Workshops put on for teachers by the Atlanta and St. Louis Feds are having the desired results, a recent assessment shows. Teachers are learning about the economy and personal finance, and they are passing this information on to a student body that desperately needs it.
An Evaluation of a State Consumer and Economic Education Program: Implications for Effective Program Delivery
In an evaluation of a consumer and economic education program in Indiana, the authors observe, “Most teachers do not want in-service programs on content; they want in-service programs that present teaching materials. The challenge, then, for in-service instructors is to teach theory and content in the context of presenting materials.” This is the more troublesome because the study shows that teachers report, almost uniformly across grade levels, that they place less emphasis on macroeconomics than on other topics asked about in the survey questionnaire.
The Impact of “Trade-offs” and Teacher Training on Economic Understanding and Attitudes
“Trade-offs” is a video/film series designed to teach some economic concepts to children in the elementary grades. In this article, Walstad reports the findings of his study to determine the effectiveness of the films and of special training programs for teachers using the series. One of the unusual aspects of this project is that Walstad attempted to determine the relationship between economic knowledge on the part of elementary school pupils and their attitudes toward economics as a subject. Few attempts have been made to measure student attitudes toward economics at this level. Walstad's methods will be of interest to other researchers, particularly his findings regarding the use of two-stage least squares (TSLS) as opposed to ordinary least squares (OLS). He asserts that OLS estimates “may be biased and inconsistent.”