Learning Activity: Westward Expansion and Marginal Productivity
Students calculate the difference between total, average and marginal productivity rates in two agricultural states to explain westward expansion in early American history.
Additional Resources on this topic: Page One Economics® Marginal Product of Labor and U.S. Westward Expansion
Standard/Benchmarks
Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics
Standard 1: Scarcity
Benchmarks: Grade 12
1. Choices made by individuals, firms or government officials are constrained by the resources to which they have access.
Standard 2: Decision Making
Benchmarks: Grade 12
1. To produce the profit-maximizing level of output and hire the optimal number of workers, and other resources, produces must compare the marginal benefits and marginal costs of producing a little more with the marginal benefits and marginal costs of producing a little less.
Standard 4: Incentives
Benchmarks: Grade 12
1. Acting as consumers, producers, workers, savers, investors, and citizens, people respond to incentives in order to allocate their scarce resources in ways that provide them the highest possible net benefits.
Standard 15: Economic Growth
Benchmarks: Grade 12
1. Economic growth is a sustained rise in a nation’s production of goods and services. Long term growth in output results from improvements in labor productivity increases in employment. It varies across countries because of differences in investments in human and physical capital, research and development, technological change, and from alternative institutional arrangements and incentives.
AP U.S. History Curriculum Alignment
Topic 3.10—Shaping a New Republic
Learning Objective K: Explain how and why competition intensified conflicts among peoples and nations from 1754 to 1800.
KC-3.3.II.A: The U.S. government forged diplomatic initiatives aimed at dealing with the continued British and Spanish presence in North America, as U.S. settlers migrated beyond the Appalachians and sought free navigation of the Mississippi River.
Topic 3.12—Movement in the Early Republic
Learning Objective N: Explain how and why competition intensified conflicts among peoples and nations from 1754 to 1800.
KC-3.3-I-B: As increasing numbers of migrants from North America and other parts of the world continued to move westward, frontier cultures that had emerged in the colonial period continued to grow, fueling social, political and ethnic tensions.
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