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 When we
began this site, we thought that our audience would be 5th and
6th graders who needed to manage their money better. We figured
that if they could do it with their allowance, with a few tips
from us, then they could do it when they got older, too.
The allowance question came up when we realized that everyone on
the team didn't get an allowance. Now we needed to find
out just how many kids actually HAD money to manage.
We designed a
survey that we gave to all of the 3rd, 4th,
5th, and 6th grade students in our school. Before we
actually looked at them, each of us predicted what the results
would be. (There were similar results in the survey that
was given in England.) Here are a few of our predictions:
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We thought that more
people would get an allowance than would not get one.
We were wrong. Of the 156 kids who took the
survey, 87 of them don't get an allowance.  |
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We predicted that more
kids would need to do chores for their allowance than
wouldn't need to. We were right. Of the 69
kids who got an allowance, 65 had to do chores in order
to get it. A lot of the chores were alike.
The highest number of kids said they have to clean their
room, do dishes, take out the trash, and take care of
pets.
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When we
asked if kids budgeted their money or planned how they
would save and spend, we were wrong again. It
seems that of the 69 kids who get an allowance, 59 of
them do some kind of budget. They spent their
money mostly on video games and clothes.
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Our next
question was "Do you think more or less than half of the
kids would say they were ever sorry that they had spent
their money on something?" The team was split on
that, but most kids said they weren't.
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We were
wondering if kids that got an allowance were expected to
pay for certain things out of it--like school lunch,
movies, or things like that. We predicted that
more than half would not have to do that with their
money and we were right. Of the 69 people getting
an allowance, only 25 had to spend their money on things
like movies, snack or lunch in school, ice cream, and
toys.
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We asked
all students, whether they got an allowance or not, if
they ever donated money of their very own to a good
cause. The team predicted correctly. Out of
149 children who answered this question, over half (88)
did donate money. Many said they gave to church,
the Red Cross, Toys for Tots, the Salvation Army,
UNICEF, and lots of other really good causes.
Isn't that great?
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The survey helped us in a couple
of ways. The results
actually gave us information about how children are spending
money and the choices they are making now. We decided to
focus on information and choices.
We were also able to decide the audience for our site
from the survey. From the Internet, we found out that
today's young people often do not get money education while in
school and that there are stories everywhere about credit card
debt and not handling money well for this age group. While
we were giving the survey, we realized that some of our lower
grade levels wouldn't understand money management because they
were too young. This made us consider our audience and
what result we wanted from having made the site. In the
end, we decided to concentrate on students who are between the
6th and 12th grade so that they would understand money better
and make better choices as they grow older. |
