Economics may be tough to learn, exam results show

Published 11:09 pm Friday, August 17, 2007

There is something different about economics. Test results are leading us to believe that there is something about economics itself that makes it different from other academic subjects … and harder to teach.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is sometimes called “The Nation’s Report Card.” Under its guidance, students across the country are tested on their knowledge of various subjects and the results are used to track how well they, and our schools, are doing.

The organization recently released the results for its first-ever test of how much our 12th-grade students know about economics. In all, 11,500 high school seniors from 590 public and private schools were tested, and 79 percent of them performed at what the organization called the basic level. In other words, they passed, barely. We would like to see them at the proficient level, but that may take some doing.

One thing in the test scores, though, was hard to explain and represents a real obstacle to improving performance. The high school students who had taken a regular course in economics didn’t do any better on the test than students who had not received any classroom instruction on the subject.

This pattern mirrors testing results we have seen at the college level. There, though, it is even worse. College students who have taken a basic economics course generally score lower on the exam given in their senior year than students who have never attended an economics class.

Obviously, something is going wrong. In no other academic subject area do we see this kind of teaching futility where taking and passing a course leaves you, at best, no more knowledgeable about the subject than if you hadn’t bothered.

What exactly that something is, though, will not be easy to figure out. It certainly isn’t obvious. There were few clues in the test results, either. Most of the results from the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress exam followed the general patterns we have come to expect from nationwide academic performance tests.

In economics, as in math and science, the boys generally do better than the girls. Caucasians and Asian-Pacific Islanders do better than other racial and ethnic groups. Kids from the large urban schools did not do as well as those from the suburbs and smaller communities. And the students with parents having college educations tended to get higher scores than kids from homes where that was not the case.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress test was designed to evaluate students’ knowledge in three areas: the market economy, the national economy and the international economy. They did best in the market economy area, where, for example, 72 percent of the students could “describe a benefit and a risk of leaving a full-time job to further one’s education.” In the national economy area, 60 percent could identify “factors that lead to an increase in the national debt.” And in the international economy portion of the exam, 63 percent “determined the impact of a decrease in oil production on oil-importing countries.”

These scores are not terrible, but we shouldn’t mistake them for good. When more than a third of our high school seniors cannot figure out what is going to happen if oil production goes down or what kinds of things make the national debt go up, it is clear that we need to do a lot better.

But what exactly should we do? If the high school courses do not have any measurable effect on students’ economic knowledge, there doesn’t seem to be much point in continuing them, let alone expanding them to cover more students. There may be a clue in a piece of the data buried deep in the statistics of the NAEP report. It turns out those students who took advanced placement economics courses did very well on the exam. Of course, we would expect that because advanced placement courses are, essentially, college-level courses and the students in the exam are being tested at a high school level.

But the success of the advanced placement students on the exam suggests a clue: economics may be tougher than it looks and this may be especially true for those students who are behind in math, a chronic problem in U.S. schools. The basic concepts involved in economics are pretty straightforward, even simple, if you approach them with the kind of logic we learn from math. Without that perspective, though, the same concepts may seem unrelated and difficult to learn. Whether math deficit disorder is the source of the problem in teaching economics or not, we need to find out what’s wrong and do better. Knowledge of economics is not a luxury today. It is a survival skill.

James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.