During the Spring 2021, amid the pandemic, I delivered (virtully) a new course for middle-schoolers (grades 6-8) "What's in Your Wallet?" under the SOAR program. This course introduced students to the concepts of money, budgeting, saving, and investing. In an engaging way, we covered the following topics: what is money, what is a paycheck, what is a budget and how to manage a monthly budget, saving and compound interest, types of bank accounts, investment, credit score, and financial markets and instruments (stocks and bonds).
As usual, the class used free educational materials from EconLowDown portal of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Various interactive assessments were utilized along the way, helping students grow their financial literacy skills.
At the end of the 6-week course, I asked students to fill out a survey about the learning outcomes of this class. The following are the results:
A. Students, on average, did not know anything about these topics: Federal Reserve System, compound interest, bonds, stocks, risk and return.
B. Based on self-assessment, on average, the knowledge of the following topics improved greatly after taking this course:
1. What is money?
2. Security features of money (they loved this topic the most!)
3. Credit score
4. Compound interest
5. Checking accounts, savings accounts, debit cards, credit cards
6. Financial goals
7. Risk and Return
8. Importance to start saving early.
I am very excited to see these results. The students learned a lot! They know basic information and now can build upon it as they grow and start earning, saving, and spending money.
The scientific evidence suggests that financial literacy education results in a greater propensity to save for retirement, reduced amount of personal debt, increased likelihood of having emergency savings, and decreased likelihood of using high-cost methods of borrowing. I thanked parents for recognizing the importance of financial literacy education and signing up their children for this class.
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