OECD Teens lack financial literacy and maths skills for digital economy
ft.com
ft.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unit-pricing-info...
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.
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?
How so? As I see it, if anything it has made it extremely easy to track things.
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.
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.
Nothing about being cashless prevents them doing this, of cause if feels silly since you also have all this information instantly available without the work.
On the other hand, with cash, you're sort of forced to keep track of it, because otherwise it will just physically run out.
I am an expat in Germany, I have two different German bank accounts plus one in my home country.
My main income is the monthly check from my company but I have lots of different ways to spend it (the aforementioned acvoubts, credit cards, paypal and sometimes even just cash. So the only way to have an overall picture of what I am spending my money is to actually periodically log it manually, labelling each transaction and adding a short description of what it was for.
Point is that it always required some action on your part, but today it requires way way less, and is far more automated.
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.
>> 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.
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.
And what I experienced when I worked in schools in 2021 was far lower standards than even then.
I wonder if it just has to do with the low hanging fruit effect -- productivity goes down as you extend from harvesting just the lowest hanging fruit to all the fruit, even the most marginal.
When my mom went to high school, she was the only one in her family who went. In the time and place she grew up in, going to high school was as rare and impressive as getting a postgraduate degree is today. Only students with sufficient motivation would even attempt high school. Needless to say, you don't have to worry about disruptive kids or keeping them motivated in that environment.
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.