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April 28, 2005
Economic literacy revisited
I could have made this an update to an earlier post, but I think the information is sufficient to warrant a separate post.
Remember that I wanted to see the study that the NY Times cites? King at SCSU Scholars has a link to the survey. Again, I quote the New York Times:
The economic literacy of both students and adults has improved since then, but only slightly.
In the report, it is stated that the test was administered to adults differently in 1999 than in 2005, so the results are not directly comparable (page 4 on this link). Ok, so what about students? 14 of the 20 questions were common to both year's exams, so they compared the results of just those questions. Grading on a standard percentage scale (90%=A, etc.) the distribution looked like this in 1999:
A: 5%
B: 6%
C: 14%
D: 11%
F: 63%
And in 2005:
A: 11%
B: 10%
C: 24%
D: 12%
F: 43%
The heading on that page is "Percentage of students scoring an 'A' or 'B' nearly doubled."
"Slightly"????? Did the NY Times writer read the report????
Admittedly there are still too many "F"s, but this is not a "slight" improvement. Read the whole survey. There are pie charts showing the results of each question for adults and students (and bar charts showing improvement on each question common to both years). It's definitely worth 20 minutes of your time, especially if you teach economics.
The survey does not report the results for adults in 1999, so I don't know how the Times writer can say that the results were better for adults (unless there is a copy of those results out there--I will keep looking). If those old results are out there and if the improvement is only slight for adults, I guess that would mean that the Times writer is only guilty of making an invalid comparison.
There is still a lot of room for improvement in questions on macroeconomics and personal finance. Our work is not done.
Posted by William Polley at April 28, 2005 01:35 AM
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Comments
Good find and you're correct; it's worth a separate post. The actual results are much more positive than the NYT article indicated.
Scariest--or, probably, the most encouraging--thing in it is the gender gap, which is 3:1 among those doing well for adults but only 2:1 among students.
There are a couple of questions there which are poorly worded. (All three answers on the resource question are valid--obtaining more is a primary driver of trade, reducing use one of innovation--though only one [make choices about how to use] defines Economics. I'm also inclined to argue that the "existence of the stock market" question has three valid answers, while neglecting the true value of the market itself.)
But that's picking nits.
Most amusing result: p. 16, where a higher percentage of adults than students answer that only the landlord benefits from a rental transaction.
Posted by: Ken Houghton at April 28, 2005 11:22 AM
The odd part about this study is that the answer branches include "I'm not sure". Doesn't that bias the results downward?
Posted by: kb at April 29, 2005 02:53 PM
If people are telling the truth when they choose or don't choose "I'm not sure" as an answer, it would take out the bias arising from guessing. If the choices were the same in both years it shouldn't have any bearing on the comparison between years.
I have been experimenting with a "knowledge survey" in some of my classes. At the beginning of the semester I ask them a series of questions to get a sense of what they know before taking the course. I also ask them to rate on a scale of 1 to 3 how confident they are of their answer (1=no idea, 2=reasonably confident, 3=very confident). It would be interesting to try something like that in this context.
Posted by: William Polley at April 29, 2005 03:34 PM