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September 14, 2009
Research on Financial Education and Youth
The Chicago Fed hosted a conference last Friday, Financial Literacy, Financial Education and the Federal Reserve. The agenda was diverse and ranged from a review of Fed-based programming to external groups discussing the proper role of the Fed in the realm of financial education. You can read more here.
However, the best take-away may have been a paper that was sitting on the publications table outside the seminar room. It is a paper by Laura Choi of the San Francisco Fed that discusses the correlation between students with banks accounts and higher levels of financial knowledge. The reason I decided to post the paper on the blog was not only to promote her central thesis but also to highlight what was uncovered as part of her background study -- the significant correlation of children who played the Stock Market Game and their increased financial knowledge. This latter correlation seemed the most impressive in her research. Please take a few minutes and read her paper here.
Overall, I think what you can safely conclude from Choi’s paper is that experiential learning may very well have significantly more impact than an entire semester-long class in personal finance. This is a pretty powerful conclusion.
What should the education community do with this knowledge?
Posted by Cindy at September 14, 2009 4:46 PM
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Comments
Integrate more experiences into the coursework. I suspect the value of the Stock Market Game comes from the context in which it's set as much as the experience itself. I look forward to reading the paper.
Posted by: Tim at September 15, 2009 4:38 PM
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