Assigning a value using money

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its economic implications such as inflation highlight, among others, the strong need to manage money and personal finances for all citizens, including youth. Most of the Canadian provinces incorporate the concept of money into elementary schools as they revise and update their mathematics curricula. However, this measurement concept is integrated differently into Canadian mathematics elementary school curricula, and because of this variety of possible approaches, we do not yet know sufficiently how students learn the concept of money as a measurement of the value of products and how they might affect the teaching and learning of money, mathematics, and citizenship education more broadly. Knowing how students learn money in mathematics supports teachers in successfully integrating the concept of money in mathematics (Savard 2022), as they have not been trained to teach financial education and increasingly encounter challenges in tackling the relationship youth have with money as well as how they use it (Johnson & Sherraden, 2007).

Our theoretical framework for this research project is composed of a triangle coming from finance, measurement theory, and mathematics education. This framework helps us design tasks for students and analyze our data. The first framework comes from finance and presents three different functions of money in our modern society (Hill, 2010): as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. The second framework comes from measurement theory and provides other lenses to this idea of unit of account as measurement. The third framework comes from Mathematics Education and offers a didactical point of view of teaching and learning measurement in elementary school.

The objectives of this research study are: 1) Identify the connections that students make between different mathematical concepts and the concept of money; 2) Investigate how Grade 4 and Grade 5 students develop an understanding of measuring the value of goods and services using money; 3) Study how measuring values using money supports the development of citizenship competencies in students such as critical thinking and decision-making.

Expected outcomes: Given the paucity of research on teaching and learning about the concept of money in elementary schools, the research results of this project launch a strong research program on teaching and learning money and financial education in elementary schools and provide new directions to this emerging research field in education.

The project delivers new and substantial results that inform academic research about how students learn about money as a measurement concept and how this learning contributes to the development of citizenship competencies.