The nation’s high school seniors performed significantly better on the first nationwide economics test than they did on other recent national exams in history and science, and demonstrated higher than expected understanding of basic market forces like supply and demand than officials expected.

Results of the economics test, which was administered last year, were released yesterday. A summary report is available online at nationsreportcard.gov.

The Department of Education translates student scores on the test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.

On the economics test, 42 percent of 12th graders performed at or above the proficient level, and 79 percent performed at or above the basic level. An economics course is required for graduation in only about a third of the states.

“The numbers here are pretty good, really,” said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the bipartisan body set up by Congress to oversee the test. “Given the number of students who finish high school with a limited vocabulary, not reading well and weak in math, the results may be as good or better than we should expect.”

In contrast, only 13 percent of 12th graders performed at or above proficient, and only 47 percent performed at or above the basic level on the national assessment test in history that was administered last year. On a similar test in science in 2005, only 18 percent of 12th graders performed at or above the proficient level, and 54 percent at or above basic.

Bruce L. Damasio, a high school economics teacher in Towson, Md., who is president of the Global Association of Teachers of Economics, said the economics results showed that “many of our 12th-grade students have a pretty good grasp of the logic of economics.”

“But when we look at the questions they can answer and the ones most of them get wrong,” Mr. Damasio said, “we see that many students are pretty shaky on the terminology of economics and on the actual ways that government and financial systems work.”

Mr. Damasio cited a question that asked students to identify the most likely effect of an increase in the hourly wage of baby sitters. Eighty percent of students answered correctly that the time spent by teenagers on baby sitting would likely go up, whereas time they spent on other activities would decrease, he said.

But on a multiple-choice question that asked students to identify one of the policy tools of the Federal Reserve, only 21 percent chose the correct answer, “buying and selling government securities.” Thirty-seven percent incorrectly chose “increasing or decreasing government spending,” and 31 percent chose “raising or lowering income taxes,” he said.

“This means that students haven’t learned that Congress and the president determine federal spending,” Mr. Damasio said.

The Department of Education periodically administers the nationwide tests in reading, mathematics, science, history, civics, geography and the arts. But although the federal testing program began in 1969, no national assessment had been conducted in economics until 2006.

A nationally representative sample of 11,500 seniors in 590 public and private schools took part in the exam.

The test questionnaire asked students to list any economics courses they had taken in high school. Although a minority of states require economics, 87 percent of seniors reported some exposure to economics content in high school.

But the effect of that exposure was surprising. The scores of students who had taken economics courses were not necessarily higher than those who had not. On average, students who had taken Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or an honors course in economics scored marginally higher than students who had taken no economics at all, but students who had taken “consumer economics” or business courses scored lower.