The economic knowledge of Czech high school students: Analysis of the Economics Olympiad

Abstract

The authors of this article investigate the economic knowledge of Czech high school students using a database of 18,589 participants from the 2019 to 2020 Czech Economics Olympiad. Czech high school students show solid comprehension of basic economic concepts and principles of international economics but understand substantially less about microeconomic and macroeconomic theory. The authors demonstrate that some prevalent features of students’ economic knowledge found in other countries are also present in the Czech Republic, including a gender gap. Their analysis confirms problematic aspects of the Czech education system identified in prior studies, including large differences in education quality across types of schools and regions.

Keywords:

• Economic education
• economic literacy
• high school economics

JEL CODES:

• A20; A21

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their many insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Gymnasiums prepare students for university studies. The closest English equivalent is a grammar school. In the Czech educational system, students can begin study at gymnasiums at the 6th grade level and continue until the 13th. Students are eligible to apply to a gymnasium only in the 5th, 7th, or 9th grade level of primary school (thus, if they are accepted, they start gymnasium in the 6th, 8th, or 10th grade levels).

2 For a description of the Czech educational system, see https://www.mzv.cz/‌washington/en/culture_events/education/education_system_in_the_czech_republic/index.html.

3 Furthermore, in most cases, it is taught by a noneconomist teacher. However, some gymnasiums offer optional economics seminars.

4 TEL is a standardized test of economic literacy used in U.S. high schools and published by the Council for Economic Education. For more information, see the manual for examiners from Walstad, Rebeck, and Butters (2013). The online version is at http://www.c3teachers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Walstad_Rebeck.pdf.

5 However, Walstad and Rebeck (1990) suggest that these results may be biased because of the pretest-posttest selection problem.

6 Note that it cannot be automatically presumed that this is a causal effect, as students chose to attend the courses, i.e., a self-selection bias is possible.

7 For the purpose of this article, we sometimes interchange economic education with financial education even though we mainly study the former.

8 FYF is a personal finance program on DVD. For more information, see the official Web site of the program at http://financingyourfuture.councilforeconed.org/.

9 For more information about INEV, see https://inev.cz/en/.

10 For an investigation of computer versus paper tests, see Butters and Walstad (2011).

11 The main reason for using the multiple choice form of the test for the school round of the Olympiad is administrative and time constraints. In the following rounds of the competition, when the number of participants is substantially lower, essay questions are also used.

12 This holds only for the school rounds; in the regional and final rounds, a combination of multiple choice and open-ended questions is used.

13 The Web page is https://ekonomickaolympiada.cz/.

14 For more information about differences in the quality of education across regions in the Czech Republic, see the analysis by the Czech School Inspectorate and the Ministry of Education, https://www.csicr.cz/cz/Aktuality/Kvalita-vzdelavani-v-jednotlivych-krajich-CR.

15 The region and grade level with lower scores have been chosen for the references. Regarding the type of schools, the technical schools variable includes all secondary technical schools except for business academies and industrial schools, which were singled out in the regression analysis.

16 Complete regression tables with regional dummies can be sent upon request.

17 Clustering at the school level is used by Oberrauch and Kaiser (2020).

18 As already mentioned, the mean in our sample is 40.9 points, and the standard deviation is 15.4 points.

19 The standard deviation of the gender gap around 0.24 is very similar to the gender gap of the 80th percentile in Oberrauch and Kaiser (2020).

20 The multiple choice part of the regional round of the Economics Olympiad, in contrast to the school round analyzed in this article, represents only 25 percent of the test, and men dominated even in this round. The essay part, which covered 25 percent of the regional round, might be preferred by females (Becker, Greene, and Rosen 1990). However, the graphical question of the supply and demand model, and the financial literacy problem on the interest rate in the regional round (both 25% weight) may again favor males (Allgood, Walstad, and Siegfried 2015; Davies, Mangan, and Telhaj 2005).

21 A similar gap was found by Oberrauch and Kaiser (2020) in Southwest Germany.

22 Our findings are consistent with Matějů, Straková, and Veselý (2010), who point to the unequal positions among gymnasiums and other schools in the Czech education system.

23 Complete regression tables with regional dummies can be sent upon request.

24 We thank an anonymous reviewer for proposing this idea.

25 We also split the sample into two parts: students from gymnasiums and technical schools. We do not present these results in the article, but they may be provided upon request.

26 The results of quantile regressions divided by the school types are available upon request. We found that the gender gap is the widest in the higher percentiles of the gymnasium subsample, specifically −0.52 standard deviation (−8.01 points) at both the 50th and the 75th quantiles. The 25th percentile technical school students is the only cohort that did not generate any gender gap.

Additional information

Funding

Pavel Potuzak acknowledges the financial support of the Internal Grant Agency of Prague University of Economics and Business, grant number: IGS VSE F5/20/2022.