Mark C. Schug

A National Survey of State Assessment Practices in the Social Studies

he debate over the development T and implementation of voluntary national standards dominated educational reform initiatives in the United States through most of the 1990s. Directly related to those initiatives is the ongoing controversy over assessment practices. Social studies, with five sets of national standards (history, geography, economics, governmentkivics, and social studies), has been embroiled in those debates and initiatives from the beginning. Supporters of those initiatives argue that the conscientious use of national and/or state standards and specific grade-level benchmarks will increase learning by K-12 students. The standards and benchmarks are also expected to facilitate the development of statelevel examinations linked to those targeted outcomes, thereby making it easier to compare results across different schools, districts, and even states.

Children's Understanding of Economics

This article is a summary of research-often conducted with children from other countries-about how children think about economic ideas and values. Several researchers characterize childrens economic reasoning as following a developmental pattern. Thinking about such concepts as scarcity, money, exchange, price, and profit becomes progressively abstract and flexible with increasing age. However, reasoning does not improve evenly with each concept. Advanced reasoning appears sooner for some concepts and later for others. For example, a clear understanding about profit, which is essential to understanding a market economy, does not emerge until around age 11. These studies also reveal that childrens thinking about economic values begins at an early age. Children apparently become more supportive of the existing economic system as they grow older. Implications from these studies include the following. Teachers need to understand the type of reasoning that children use about economic ideas so they can reduce misconceptions that young people have. Teachers also need to emphasize concrete ideas when teaching economic ideas, giving special attention to the personal experiences of young people. Curriculum planners should specify and define the economic ideas to be taught at each grade level, taking into account childrens varying types of economic reasoning. Finally, it is important to recognize that there is a value dimension to teaching economics at the elementary level.

What Educational Research Says about the Development of Economic Thinking

Abstract Helping young people learn to grapple successfully with economic issues is clearly a fundamental goal of citizenship education. During the 1950s, there was the beginning of some research about how children and adolescents think about economic-related ideas. This research waned throughout most of the 1960s and early 1970s. Recently, there is new but limited evidence of an increased interest in this area of investigation. This article provides a summary of the studies done in the 1950s and early 1960s as a backdrop for a report on more recent work done in the mid-1970s.

The Homeless Social Studies Teacher: How Muzak Progressivism Has Harmed Social Studies Education.

very year, people send their tax E returns off to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Many hire tax accountants to prepare their returns for them, happily paying the necessary fees. When an important task is difficult to perform, it can be a blessed relief to know that some people really are good at doing it. But how does a certified public accountant (CPA) attain the competence a client relies on every year? Our informal conversations with tax accountants suggest that their professional training is less than ideal. Accountants describe training programs featuring courses and assignments focused on dry, complex rules and procedures encoded in the dense language of statutes, regulations, and court rulings. Those training to be

Teaching the Economics of the Environment

This article addresses what is currently taught about the environment in the school curriculum and explains how an economics approach can change it. A recent study in the United States provides evidence supporting the suspicions of many economists that the environmental education in schools is often flawed. The Independent Commission on Environmental Education (1997) concluded that most curriculum materials it examined lacked an emphasis on basic economic concepts. Curriculum materials would be improved by recognising the importance of economic forces. For example, markets provide incentives that influence peoples environmental actions and market approaches — as opposed to government command and rule systems — foster cooperation between groups and individuals. The primary contribution of economics to environmental education is recognition of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons states that people take better care of things they own and tend to overuse things they do not own. This simple but powerful lesson holds important meaning for environmental education. In contrast non-market solutions leave us only with solutions involving force, expense, and guilt. The author concludes by describing a middle-level curriculum published by the National Council on Economic Education, which strives to use market forces to analyse environmental problems.

Development in Children's Thinking about International Trade

nternational trade issues have I become increasingly important with the globalization of the world economy. Regional trade arrangements in Europe, North America, the Pacific Rim, and the Caribbean are developing rapidly. International competition remains a substantial challenge to American f m s . Leaders concerned about damage to the environment are increasingly demanding remedies that have serious international economic implications. Clearly, citizens of the future wil l require a highly developed understanding of the costs and benefits associated with international trade. There is evidence that young people do not understand the economics of international trade as well as they understand more fundamental economic concepts (Walstad and Soper 1988). We contend that teachers and curriculum leaders need to understand how children and adolescents reason

Milwaukee's Youth Enterprise Academy: An Eight-year Study of a Model Program for Urban Youth

for companies that provided defined benefit pensions. Banks offered routine services like savings accounts and checking accounts. People bought homes and saved what money they could. Today, the situation has changed. Most companies no longer offer defined benefit pension plans and, instead, allow employees to enroll in 401(k) programs, which are defined contribution programs. Banks and other financial institutions offer a complex range of financial instruments and services, with many services available on the Internet. Accompanying this changing financial environment is an increase in the population’s financial misbehaviors, including a greater number of bankruptcies, accumulations of large amounts of credit debt, and low rates of personal saving. The problem is more serious for minority populations in urban households. Nonwhites are more likely to file for bankruptcy and have lower credit scores than whites. Table 1 is an illustration of the large gap between whites and nonwhites in net wealth, which is the net value of all assets, including homes, cars, stocks, and savings accounts. Differences in asset ownership between whites and nonwhites appear to be one of the important contributors to the gap. The Federal Reserve (Aizcorbe, Kennickell, and Moore 2003) reports that nonwhites or Hispanics own homes at a lower rate than do white non-Hispanics and hold less business equity. Nonwhites or Hispanics are less likely to invest in bonds, mutual funds, retirement, stocks, or certificates of deposits. Although an economic and financial education is certainly important for all young people, one can make the case for it being of particular importance to minorities. Alas, economic education is less frequently offered in large urban high schools than it is in suburbs or medium-sized cities (Walstad 2001). Many studies and reports indicate the need to improve programs for financial and economic education. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a leading voice advocating for increased economic education, has stated,

How Well Do the Us Standards Work Together? An Analysis of the Economic Content of Four National Standards for Social Studies

The standards movement in the United States — a movement, which is roughly analogous to the National Curriculum movement in the United Kingdom, has now produced national standards for several subject areas. Social studies educators in the United States now possess a set of five national standards. But will these standards make reforming the curriculum more or less difficult? We used the economics content standards published by the National Council on Economic Education as the basis examining the economic content in the social studies, history, civics, and geography standards. Our analysis suggests that important economics content is absent in places where it should be prominent; it is presupposed in places where it should be explicitly identified, and it is sometimes represented inaccurately. If our analysis is correct, then efforts to use the national standards as the basis of curriculum improvement — especially as efforts relate to improving economic understanding — face an uphill task.

Public Choice Theory: A New Perspective for Social Education Research

c ocial education research has o d r a w n from a wide variety of perspectives, including history, cognitive development theory, political socialization, feminism, and global and multicultural approaches. Each perspective has cast new light on problems in social studies teaching and learning. Public choice theory, a perspective most closely associated with economics and political science, is conspicuous by its absence in social education research. Economic analysis is most often applied to the study of financial decisions in private markets. In recent years, however, economists have begun to investigate other aspects of life. Prejudice, marriage, family life, and altruism all have been the subjects of investigation by ground-breaking economists such as

Can Free-Market Environmentalism Be Mainstream? Teachers' Attitudes about Economic Perspectives on the Environment.

lsewhere in this issue of The Social E Studies Anderson and Shaw (2000) make a compelling case that freemarket evironmentalism is gaining widespread support among a growing number of economists. But is it likely to gain support among teachers? For several reasons, teachers might object to the analysis. First, the institution in which most teachers work-the public schools -is not very market oriented. The culture of the public schools tends to resist market-oriented solutions: