Economics department awarded $20,000 grant

GC&SU was been awarded a grant from the National Council on Economic Education in the amount of $20,000, which will be matched by Georgia Council on Economic Education.

Director for the Center for Economic Education and assistant professor Dr. John Swinton and assistant professor Dr. Ben Scafidi of GC&SU will be working in collaboration with Dr. Thomas De Barry from North Georgia College & State University.

Swinton said this was his first application for this particular grant; however, he had applied for various other grants in the past as a Senator for Economic Education.

“This would be our first major research grant from the National Council and it is a matching grant,” said Swinton.
Swinton said he, Dr. De Barry and Scafidi plan on using the grant over the next year for research on the effectiveness of workshops provided to teachers by the Georgia Council.

Swinton said that in order to measure the effectiveness of the Georgia Council workshop program they measure how well students do on the “end of the year course test.”

“We spend millions and millions of dollars in Georgia and nationally on professional learning for teachers and we do almost no research to see if it works,” Scafidi said

The governor’s office of student achievement website provides information about the end-of-course-tests (EOCT) given to students statewide. The results show that students fail the economic portion more than any other portion on the EOCT.

“Economics has the highest fail rate, so 43 percent of high school students who took the end of course test fail it,” Scafidi said.

The graphs provided on the Governor’s Office of Student Achievment Web site report that 43 percent of students who took the test in the 2004-2005 school year failed the economic portion. However, that percentage is down from the previous year in which 56 percent of students failed.

“It is so important now, because the state now makes all these tests count 15 percent of the students’ final grade,” Scafidi said.

According to the National Council on Economic Education Web site, a portion of the funding allocated for The Excellence in Economic Education Act is given to state and local education programs. As a result of the No Child Left Behind Act, the NCEE distributes many grants in order to fund different national programs.

The NCEE website states, “This organization in turn must allocate three quarters of EEE funding to State and local education organizations to carry out the purposes of the program.”

The Web site also announced other economic departments selected around the country to receive the grant for Evaluations of Impact of Economic and Financial Literacy Education on Students. Eight schools were chosen from the following states: California, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico and Texas.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 17 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry