OECD Teens lack financial literacy and maths skills for digital economy

https://www.ft.com/content/cbd46c42-9729-41ee-bc3e-16016924b779

by Pamar • 2 years ago

35 34 2 years ago

graemep• 2 years ago

Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills.

I think a lot of adults will struggle too. Moving to cashless has made things harder to track, we have more financial products and more complex ones available.

I think the solution is probably more adult education and learning opportunities so people can learn as they need to.

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills.

Is that to say teens of the past were forced to have more experience and current teens are more "coddled" / able to escape into digital distractions / not forced to overcome hardships like we did in the past?

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

As a young person, yes I would agree with this.

gklitz3• 2 years ago

Moving to cashless has made things harder to track

How so? As I see it, if anything it has made it extremely easy to track things.

doubled112• 2 years ago

I think by "track" they mean "keep track of". A lot of people don't get the same connection to digits in a DB as they did to cash, plus you can't spend cash you don't have.

If you hand somebody $500, they know how much they have, and they know how much they spent even after a few transactions.

If you hand somebody a debit card with a balance of $500, it's easier to lose track and keep swiping until it's in overdraft.

physicsguy3• 2 years ago

It's easier to see an instant balance, but I think there's a big difference between that and managing money that was much more manual before. I think by virtue of the manual process, people had to be much more familiar with the maths.

I can remember my parents sitting down with a cheque book which had a transaction log at the back, and all of their receipts and logging those so that they knew their exact balance at a given time and knew how much they'd got left to spend from the account.

samarthr1• 2 years ago

As a newly minted ex teen, I agree that we have insufficient life experience. My dad is of the opinion that the experiences gained with independence in low impact, yet meaningful decisions and experiencing the consequences thereof is the best way to impart wisdom.

He maddeningly will tell me to go swim myself when the stakes are low, but will listen and give suggestions when matters get more impactful long term.

From my observations about my peer group, I seem to be the most "free" in the terms of making decisions for many things.

tekla• 2 years ago

> Across the 14 OECD countries within the 20 nations surveyed — including the US, Italy and the Netherlands — an average of 18 per cent of teens had difficulties using division to handle their finances.
> These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value.

I have a hard time imagining how low education standards are.

galdosdi2• 2 years ago

Let me help your imagination then!

I substitute taught 10th grade math at a Midwestern public school district for half a year in 2021

I had multiple students who pulled out their calculators to multiply by 1 or by 0. This is extreme, most weren't that bad, but the median student was pretty confused about fractions.

I was supposed to teach sines and cosines.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

And people wonder why you need a college degree for most jobs; all a high school diploma shows is you mostly showed up.

corimaith• 2 years ago

I can understand for the US where budgets have been slashed along with failures in specific policy like Common Core, but why is this also happening in other countries where there should be greater support systems? The Nordic countries falling behind USA is especially shocking, given their more homogeneous societies.

Kon-Peki• 2 years ago

Common Core would have been incredible if it weren't for the sellout state boards of education doing whatever the giant education corporations told (paid?) them to do.

It would have finally given teachers the ability to manage individualized education for every student in their classes. Instead, we continue to heap more and more demands on teachers without any concern on whether a single human is able to meet them. And to make up for it, we continue to let the standards slip. Because there is no other option.

neilv2• 2 years ago

These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value.

While we know that's a more complicated problem than just the arithmetic the article implies, a dark pattern by retailers actively works against the arithmetic challenge...

More often than not, when I look at the cost per unit on a grocery store shelf tag, or on Amazon, the retailer will be using different units for different SKUs of essentially the same generic product -- between different brands, and even between different sized packages of the same brand.

So instead of being helpful, it's a time-wasting diversion from the arithmetic, and also noise diversion cluttering the actual per-package prices.

Don't tell me that a grocery chain doesn't know what kind of product is in a package, nor know that consumers would like to be able to compare the cost per some reasonable unit of that kind.

Software didn't invent the dark pattern; we just scaled up earlier slimy innovations.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

I'm a little obsessive about the unit cost of everyday items and in addition to them using inconsistent units, it's not uncommon for it to be wrong.

A few days ago I was in a CVS and a 4.25 oz box of candy was $1.99 and listed with a per oz cost of 39.8 cents. Either the price had gone up or through shrinkflation the size went from 5 oz to 4.25 oz and the unit cost was not recalculated. I see it too regularly to be able to trust that number on the tag.

neilv2• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, I notice outright wrong ones, too. In partial defense of the retailer, sometimes those seem to be due to the product being miscoded in their database (e.g., involving bundles of multiple retail packages, or maybe just the occasional typo of info that's not caught). Which could be accidental (rather than some of the other obfuscation, which is glaring and pervasive enough to seem intentional).

But even when accidental, it gives the impression that they don't care that the information they're displaying authoritatively is outright wrong (or they would find a way not to do it so often).

cedws• 2 years ago

In UK supermarkets the unit price is usually shown on the display.

resoluteteeth• 2 years ago

The same is true in the US but what the parent comment is saying is that in the US, the displayed unit prices are often in different units which makes them difficult to compare.

rcbdev• 2 years ago

Everything is listed in €/kg or €/L on the price label almost everywhere I've ever been. Only notable exceptions that come to mind would be the UK and US.

leapingdog• 2 years ago

The UK has unit pricing[0] though I can't remember when it was introduced.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unit-pricing-info...

physicsguy3• 2 years ago

I suspect that despite people's familiarity with technology, it's not just maths that will hold them back in this.

I taught 1st year undergrad students in Engineering (mechanical, civil, aerospace) programming between 2014-2019, usually Python and C. We saw a rapid average decline in ability over that period in basic functionality with computers. Really first noticed it in about 2016. As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again. There wasn't much difference in entry grades or anything between the year groups.

I strongly suspect this was largely due to smartphones coming out over people's formative years and meaning that they weren't using computers as much, so coming into University and going into the workplace they'd find it much harder. The iPhone launched in 2007 and so these kids entering University in 2016 onwards would have been born in 1998 and so started to be exposed to them from primary education, whereas slightly older kids wouldn't have seen them til they were already in secondary education.

Spivak• 2 years ago

As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again

I mean they were using computers, just a different mode of computing. I think the take-away is that these things just aren't as intuitive as we assume they are. The filesystem is a fairly complex abstraction with an huge API that grew organically over a long period of time and the user-facing interface modeled a paper-oriented office with filing cabinets and briefcases that doesn't exist anymore.

I would approach it backwards if I was teaching it today where you code in an all-in-one dev environment where the fact that say Python modules are files doesn't really matter. And then the filesysrem is presented as the way to persist data across program invocations.

SR2Z• 2 years ago

I mean, the filesystem is just hierarchical organization. It's not even really a computer skill - I remember being taught how to use an encyclopedia in school with its index.

The UI is not a big deal because graphically, there are only so many ways to represent a hierarchy. Even 3d file managers are pretty intuitive because the base data structure is simple.

It's really easy to use a computer when someone has already programmed it to do the things you want. It's much harder to use one as a machine that can be programmed to do anything.

_lvbh2• 2 years ago

Similarly, in Cardiff Uni’s 1st year Software Engineering course, kids had to be given explicit instructions on how to unzip a file and some even needed help explaining what directories are

physicsguy3• 2 years ago

This was Southampton, so probably similar academics standards.

kwere• 2 years ago

its mostly due of computer science becoming mainstream and no more niche or for "asocial nerds". Only a selfselected minority 'back then' thinkered their afternoons around computers

OECD Teens lack financial literacy and maths skills for digital economy

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