Browsing by Author "Lääti, Ville"

Economic competence is seen alongside reading, writing, and numeracy as one of the key future citizen skills. As the prevalence of financial difficulties and the digitalization of everyday life increase among adolecents, concerns about their economic competence have arisen in public discourse. Proposed solutions include introducing a separate subject on financial literacy and using games for teaching purposes. Compared internationally, Finnish adolecents have a good level of economic competence, but this topic has not been studied in the context of primary school. Gamification is an emerging trend in the education market, and learning games have been developed for improving economic competence. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the Taloussankari Junior -educational game enhances the economic competence of fourth-grade students. Since adolecents’ economic competence has been found to be related to mathematical and language skills, the study aims to determine how these factors influence learning outcomes gained by gameplay. This thesis was conducted as a quantitative case study in a primary school in Tampere. 58 students participated in the initial test, and 54 students took part in the final test. Between the initial and final tests, the students played the 'Taloussankari Junior' educational game developed by Talous ja Nuoret TAT. The survey included 15 multiple-choice questions divided into three areas of economic competence: economic knowledge, economic behavior, along with economic attitudes and responsible consumption. In conjunction with the test, students reported their most recent grades in Finnish language and mathematics to measure the impact of linguistic and mathematical skills on economic competence. Participants already had a high level of economic competence before the learning period began. Although students' economic competence improved during the learning period, the repeated measures analysis showed that the changes were not statistically significant. As exceptions, students' perception of scarcity of money became clearer and impulsive spending decreased significantly. Consistent with previous research findings, the Kruskal-Wallis test demonstrated that linguistic and mathematical skills were statistically significant predictors of economic competence. Based on the study, it is recommended to incorporate Taloussankari Junior -alongside other teaching methods for the instruction of economic competence.