Social Studies Curriculum

Economics Framework

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ESL Economics Course

Course Description

The ESL Economics course is for the bilingual student who is developing English language skills and economic principles at the same time.  It is designed to introduce students to economics vocabulary, concepts, principles, and institutions.  Students will learn to apply economic reasoning to their lives as citizens, consumers, workers, and producers.

Course Goals

Through this course students will:

1. Understand the basic principles and concepts of economics.
2. Become economically literate participants in the local, national, and global economies as consumers, producers, savers, investors, and citizens.
3. Understand the roles and interaction of the individual, government, and economic institutions in a market economy.
4. Develop critical thinking skills and how to apply fundamental economic concepts to their lives and important economic issues.
5. Learn and apply measurement concepts and methods such as ratios, percentage, index numbers, averages, charts, graphs, and tables.

Course Standards and Objectives

In Economics, students will:

Standard 1: Scarcity and Choice

1. Understand that productive resources are limited.
2. Explain why individuals, governments, and societies experience scarcity.
3. Explain how the allocation of limited resources is determined.
   

Standard 2: Opportunity Cost and Trade-offs

1. Understand that effective decision making requires making choices by comparing the costs and benefits of various alternatives.
2. Define and give examples of opportunity costs.

Standard 3: Economic Systems

1. Understand that different methods can be used to allocate goods and services.
2. Understand that a capitalist economic system is defined by the existence of profits, prices that are determined by the forces of supply and demand, and private property rights.
3. Compare and contrast the ways goods and services are allocated differently by traditional, command and market economies.
   

Standard 4: Economic Incentives

1. Understand that people respond predictably to positive and negative incentives.
2. List costs and benefits in particular situations and make predictions given changes in incentives.
3. Explain the importance of prices, the incentive of profits and existence of property rights in a market economy.

Standard 5: Economic Institutions

1. Understand that institutions evolve in market economies to help individuals and groups accomplish their goals. Banks, labor unions, corporations, legal systems, and not-for-profit organizations are examples of important institutions.
2. List ways that private institutions such as banks, unions, or corporations influence resource allocation in a market economy.
3. Explain the role of an important institution in making trading easier and describe how this improves social welfare.

Standard 6: Exchange, Money, and Interdependence

1. Understand that voluntary exchange occurs only when all participating parties expect to gain.
2. Explain money's role as a medium of exchange.
3. Understand that money makes it easier to trade, borrow, save, invest, and compare the value of goods and services.
4. Describe how people gain from the voluntary exchange of goods and services.
5. List ways that free trade increases the material standard of living.

Standard 7: Markets and Prices

1. Markets exist when buyers and sellers interact. This interaction determines market prices and thereby allocates scarce goods and services.
2. Explain how the interaction of buyers and sellers determines price in a particular situation.
3. Explain the role of price in allocating resources to different goods and services.
4. Compare and contrast other methods for allocating resources with the use of market prices.

Standard 8: Supply and Demand

1. Distinguish between demand and quantity demanded; and supply and quantity supplied.
2. Describe the reasons for changes in demand and supply.
3. Understand that when supply or demand changes, market prices adjust, affecting incentives.
4. Understand that prices send signals and provide incentives to buyers and sellers.
5. Create and interpret graphs of supply and demand.

Standard 9: Competition and Market Structure

1. Understand that competition among sellers lowers costs and prices and encourages producers to produce more of what consumers are willing and able to buy.
2. Understand that competition among buyers increases prices and allocates goods and services to those people who are willing and able to pay the most for them.
3. Explain the role of an entrepreneur in the market economy.
4. Provide an example and discuss the significance of a particular entrepreneur in US history.
5. Discuss the element of risk in creating a new business.
6. Explain why new firms enter an industry.

Standard 10: Income Distribution

1. Understand that income for most people is determined by the market value of the productive resources they sell.
2. Understand that what workers earn depends, primarily, on the market value of what they produce and how productive they are.
3. List reasons for differences in income between occupations.

Standard 11: Market Failures

1. Understand that market failures occur when there is inadequate competition, lack of access to reliable information, resource immobility, externalizes, and the need for public goods. An example of market failure is pollution.
2. Describe the Tragedy of the Commons and apply the concept to Alaska resources.

Standard 12: Role of Government

1. Understand that there is an economic role for government in a market economy.
2. Understand that governments often provide schools, transportation, national defense, and address environmental concerns, define and protect property rights, attempt to make markets more competitive, and redistribute income.
3. Understand that costs of government policies sometimes exceed benefits. This may occur because of incentives facing voters, government officials, and government employees, because of actions by special interest groups that can impose costs on the general public, or because social goals other than economic efficiency are being pursued.
4. Explain how governments provide the framework of the market by defining and enforcing property rights.
5. List the costs and benefits of a particular governmental function.
6. Define and give examples of public goods.
   

Standard 13: Gross Domestic Product

1. Understand that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the total dollar amount of final goods and services produced in the domestic economy in one year. It is the sum of personal consumption, government spending, business investment and net exports.
2. Define GDP and identify its components.
   

Standard 15: Unemployment

1. Understand that unemployment imposes costs on individuals and nations.
2. List the costs of unemployment to individuals and the nation.
3. Understand that the unemployment rate is the number of people who are unemployed expressed as a percentage of the labor force. Significant unemployment implies that the nation is not using its scarce resources as efficiently as possible.

Standard 16: Inflation and Deflation

1. Understand that inflation is sustained increase in the general level of prices, while deflation is a sustained decrease in the general level of prices.
2. Understand that unexpected inflation or deflation imposes costs on many people and benefits on some others because it arbitrarily redistributes purchasing power.
3. Explain how inflation reduces the value of money, financial assets, and income.
4. Identify ways some people benefit from inflation while others lose.
5. List factors that lead to a high rate of inflation and methods used to attempt to control it.

Standard 17: Savings and Investment

1. Understand that interest rates, adjusted for inflation, rise and fall to balance the amount saved with the amount borrowed, which affects the allocation of scarce resources between present and future uses.
2. Explain how changes in interest rates allocate resources between the present and future.
3. Identify ways to invest in people and explain how human capital investment increases a nation's income.

Standard 18: Monetary Policy

1. Understand that monetary policy influences the overall level of employment, output, and prices.
2. Understand that the Federal Reserve System as the nation's central bank and its role in U.S. monetary policy.

Standard 19: Fiscal Policy

Understand that fiscal policy: taxation and government spending decisions made by the Executive and Legislative branches influence the overall levels of employment, output, and prices.

Standard 20: Productivity

1. Understand that investment in factories, machinery, new technology, and in the health, education, and training of people can raise future standards of living.

Standard 21: Economic Growth

1. Understand that economic growth is a sustained rise in the production of goods and services.
2. Understand that economic growth is the result of an increase in the stock of resources and improvements in the technology and human capital.
3. Identify the role of improved technology in the long term growth of the economy.
4. Describe the relationship between governmental policy (i.e. changing the tax rate of capital gains) and economic growth.
5. Distinguish between economic growth and economic development.

Standard 22: Absolute and Comparative Advantage and Barriers to Trade

1. Understand that when individuals, regions, and nations specialize in what they can produce at the lowest cost and then trade with others, both production and consumption increase.
2. Explain how specialization increases the output for people and nations that trade.
3. Define opportunity cost of specialization in specific cases.
4. Discuss the difference between absolute and comparative advantage.
5. Identify goods and services for which Alaska has comparative advantage.
6. Understand that international trade results in increased global interdependence.
   

Standard 23: Exchange Rates and the Balance of Power

1. Understand that the exchange rate between two nations' currencies is determined by their balance of trade in goods, services, and assets.
2. Understand that exchange rates are also affected by expectations regarding price levels in various countries.
3. Compare the benefits and costs of fixed or floating exchange rates.
4. Calculate the price of US goods in another currency at a given exchange rate.

Standard 24: International Aspects of Economic Development

1. Understand that economic development is a sustained expansion of a nation's standard of living.
2. Understand that differences in the level of economic development between nations are determined by each nation's government policies, institutions, and utilization of resources.

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