Collection
Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues

Help your middle school and high school students think critically with 16 ready-made lessons about ethical issues. These lessons help students understand why ideas of right and wrong are vital to economic decision making.

 

In this collection of lessons, students will create and support an argument for or against a sweatshop boycott using primary and secondary sources; consider perspectives related to whether or not businesses have a social responsibility during a simulation, primary source discussion, and creating a marketing pitch for a company’s board of directors; play the roles of doctors and patients, demonstrating the motives of self-interest, duty, and character in economic transactions; learn how their bias impacts their decision-making and research.

Lesson

Can We End Housing Insecurity?

Students compare the economic costs and benefits of helping people who are experiencing housing insecurity and consider the ethical implications.
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Marginal Analysis

Can You Be Fashionable and Ethical?

Students “produce” blue jeans and make business choices about production to simulate the decision of changing from more expensive, but...
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Incentives, Marginal Analysis

Can You Allocate Ethically?

In Lesson #4 from the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students work in groups to analyze allocation methods, apply...
Key Concepts: Allocation, Allocation, Allocation…

Does Self-Interest Prevent Economic Justice?

In Lesson #7 0f the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students explore basic ideas of justice by examing government...
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Incentives, Marginal Analysis

Can You Conduct Research Ethically?

In Lesson #2 of the "Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues" curriculum, students learn about positive and normative economics and how...
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Marginal Analysis

Is Efficiency Ethical?

In Lesson #5 of the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students role-play to understand both the power and limits...
Key Concepts: Scarcity