Primary Economic Concepts
Evidence of Student Learning for Primary Economic Concepts
The information below is suggested evidence of student learning and activities, based on A Framework for Teaching Basic Concepts, Council for Economic Education, 1995.
Scarcity
Students can state orally all the toys they want, which of those toys they have, and explain why they can't have all the toys they want.
Economic Wants
From pictures or a collection of different types of items, such as baseballs cards, comic books, miniature box of raisins, and apples, students will select one and describe how they feel when they receive the item.
Goods
Students will describe five objects that they would like to buy at a local store and explain why they want these objects.
Services
Students will state five services that their teacher provides for them, and name other ways these services might be provided if the teacher did not perform them.
Choice
Given a list of 20 goods and services, and only tokens representing money, students will select the goods and services they want most, explain their choices to a partner and cite scarcity as the reason why they had to make choices.
Consumers
Given pictorial examples of people using goods and services, students working in pairs will explain why the people depicted are called consumers and identity the goods and services being consumed.
Producers
Students will identify five different types of producers of goods and five different types of producers of services.
Resources
Students will list all the resources that would be needed to build their school and categorize them as natural, human, and human-made (capital) resources.
Natural Resources
Students will list five different natural resources and identify at least five different uses for trees and for water in producing goods and services for people.
Human Resources
Given pictures of people in several different occupations, students will name types of skills these people need in order to do their jobs.
Capital Resources
From a group of classroom items such as desk, chair, flag, clothes hanger, etc., students will name tall the products that had to be made (such as hammers, axes, nails, glue) in order to make these classroom items.
Opportunity Cost
Given a choice between going to the movies, going to a pizza parlor, or going to an amusement park, students will choose the most favored alternative and will explain which activity is the opportunity cost of the choice.
Opportunity Cost/Resources
given a list of goods and services, students will name alternative uses for the productive resources used to make them and identify the forgone goods and services as the opportunity cost of the goods and services actually produced. For example, wood used to make a table might have been used instead in building a house, and the worker(s) who built the table might instead have been employed in building the house.
Specialization
Given tow or more examples of adults in the school or community who specialize in the production of a good or service (baker, law enforcement officer, teacher), students will name the goods and services that these individuals consume but do not produce for themselves.
Interdependence
Students will name five different items produced by a farmer, baker, and one other person chosen by the class; name five different items each of those persons might want, such as a house, can hot rolls, milk, etc., and explain how each person can get what he wants through exchange.
Barter
Students will state the difficulties involved in bartering after engaging in the following activity: Explain to students that each will be given something he or she can trade. Distribute a number of different items in varying quantities to members of the class. Ask students to identify which of the items distributed they would like to have most and them attempt to trade with the person who has the item.
Money
After discussion of the use of money instead of barter, students will state at least three reasons why use of money is preferable.
Division of Labor/Specialization
From the following example, students will analyze the effects of specialization on interdependence: the Lopez family owns a cattle ranch and members of the family spend all their time raising cattle. What other people and businesses doe the Lopezes have to rely on in order to specialize in raising cattle?
Markets
Students will identify places near their own homes where specific goods such as food, toys or clothes are sold.
Public Goods
Students will identify from the following list which goods and services are provided by government: tickets to a play, the fire department, the police department, a television set.