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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:
- 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.
Citations:
Graphs on this page were
created by the $mart
Piggy team. |