A cognitively-oriented course of economics instruction will affect student attitudes toward economic issues. This was the finding of a study designed to ascertain economic attitudes in adolescents. Economic attitudes were measured by an instrument which used eight moderately reliable multi-item scales. The measure was applied in a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design to two groups of ninth-graders. One group had previous economics instruction and the other had not. This research design measured the affective impact of a cognitively-oriented economics curriculum. The research was based on two hypotheses: (1) that economics instruction would have an impact on student attitudes toward economic issues; and (2) that the observed attitudinal changes would be in the same direction as affective changes associated with developmental trends. At the pretest, there were no systematic or statistically significant differences between the two groups. Analysis of covariance at the posttest showed modest but statistically significant differences between the groups on five scales. The results also gave qualified support to the hypothesis that these instructional effects may be interpreted as an acceleration of developmental trends in economic and related social attitudes. (SM)