Edward Boddy
University of South Florida
Thomas S. Tocco
Pinellas County Schools (Fla.)
Abstract: The study attempted to survey the level of economic understanding of high school seniors in Southwest Florida and the contributions made to the development of this understanding by the social studies curriculum. Senior classes were drawn from randomly selected high schools in ten Southwestern Florida counties yielding an N of 455 students. The Test of Economic Understanding was administered to the subjects. The summary results suggest that students in Southwestern Florida are significantly below both the standard set by the National Task Force on Economic Education and the mean reported for the group used to norm the TEU. The number of social studies courses taken by seniors was found, in general, not to affect the student’s level of economic understanding. One exception was the existence of a significant difference between those students who had taken no more than two social studies courses and all others. To test the possibility of selection factors in operation in the social studies design, secondary analyses on academic and personological differences were conducted. As noted by Kerlinger (1966), the internal validity of ex-post facto research is enhanced by secondary analyses such as these since they can serve to eliminate viable alternative explanations of the results. The results of these analyses indicated no systematic differences on identified educationally important variables among the classifications used in this study.
Citation: Boddy, E., & Tocco, T. S. (1974). The development of economic understanding in southwest Florida high school seniors. Florida Journal of Educational Research, 16(1), 28-34.
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