Money adventures: Introducing economic concepts to preschool children in the South African context

Abstract

The study examined the effectiveness of a programme that was designed to improve young children’s identification and understanding of economic concepts such as money, income, expenses and savings. The children’s ages ranged from 4.5 to 6.5 years ( N = 23). The children’s ability to identify as well as show an understanding of specific economic concepts was assessed three times: (i) before programme implementation to obtain baseline data, (ii) soon after programme implementation to evaluate the impact of the programme, and (iii) one month after the end of the programme to test the stability of the change over time. The results showed that (a) performance on understanding economic concepts improved significantly from 30% to 62%, while that on identification of economic concepts improved from 52% to 64%, (b) the improvement in performance on both sets of tasks remained high and statistically significant one month after programme withdrawal, and (c) older children benefited more from the programme than did younger children. The practical implications of these findings for the development of a pre-school curriculum that incorporates financial aspects are discussed.