A recent article from Wired, How to Teach Your Kids About Money, got my attention. When I was a child, I didn’t receive any financial literacy. I had to learn the hard way. Throughout my life I’ve always heard, “why didn’t they teach us that in school?” There was no way a 13 year old me would have been able to think about something other than music, football, or playing GoldenEye 007 multiplayer on N64 at my friends house. I decided to look into ways of teaching financial literacy through mobile educational technology, and see if there’s a way to bring it into formal education.
More kids these days, at least my nieces and nephews, in their teens, are using their allowances, birthday and Christmas money to make purchases from Amazon, Shein, Roblox, and Xbox Live. The Wired article mentions apps like Rooster Money and gohenry which have features such as an allowance manager, chore tracker, debit card or credit card link to the app, and even a gamified award system where stars earned are progressed into money.
But how can we incorporate this into formal education through mobile and education technology? Students are already taught to solve these financial problems in math class. Token economies are used widely. We know that students are more engaged when they get to use digital devices. I’ve looked at two studies, one where a game was used, and one where it was done formally, without technology.
In 2017, there was a study (Ko, 2017) through Ontario’s Ministry of Education to see if financial literacy could be taught through a game called Save the Camp. In the game, financial decisions have to be made on income, savings, debt, and spending. The authors found participants were engaged for the eight-week period, they applied those financial concepts, and they even developed strategies to succeed.
In 2020, a dissertation (Maxwell, 2020) was published about incorporating six-unit financial literacy into an algebra curriculum for secondary students. It was found that authentic and problem based learning lead to higher achievement with a financial literacy curriculum that met multiple sets of standard (Maxwell, 2020).
A brief look at this Wired article, and these studies, show the importance of financial literacy and how it can be achieved. It leaves me with the following questions: how can it be done authentically with technology? Should financial literacy be done with mobile technology in the classroom? Should it be up to parents and done at home? I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.
References
Albert, Ko,; Partnership, Learning. Examining the Effects of Game-Based Learning on Developing Youth Financial Literacy. Toronto, ON, CA: Learning Partnership, 2017.
Maxwell, A. (2020). Incorporating financial literacy into high school mathematics (Order No. 27961858). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2461428794). Retrieved from https://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/dissertations-theses/incorporating-financial-literacy-into-high-school/docview/2461428794/se-2?accountid=14656
How to Teach Kids About Money
7 responses to “How to Teach Kids About Money”
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I think this is a good idea to provide those alternatives to students to learn and apply learnings outside the classroom. I would say that using games works better as a complementary strategy when teaching daily life competencies. Learning through this kind of game is incidental so that students can be autonomous. However, students need still teachers’ support to situate learning. I see the potential for this kind of learning solution even for adult people. It could prevent students from the negative consequences of their decisions in real life. Nevertheless, learning strategies should not rely only on game-based solutions because learning is not an isolated process.
Hi Mark
This is a great topic to discuss. I would like to share some of my practice as a founder of an Ed-tech company, teaching financial literacy to children of 3-16 years old.
We have found that it is more family influence than school education. From schools, students receive financial education and learn financial knowledge. However, children learn how to live a decent life from their families. People tend to define financial literacy as how much financial knowledges they have. However, in our daily observation and research, we tend to define it as how people understand the economic and financial world, and also how people make rational decisions. If a parent were not changing their way of living, children are duplicating their parents. That might contribute to the fact that even finance major graduates may not make rational decisions in their daily lives or make good use of financial instruments.
For teaching techniques, we target at family as a learning unit rather than the child only. Family toolkits are developed with online animated programs for families to learn knowledge and concepts online while practicing with offline family toolkits. All programs are age-sensitive. So, we provide programs to 4 age groups: 3-6 years old, 7-9 years old, 10-14 years old, and 15 above, along with parents learning programs of respective ages too. We are not trying gamify all upper aged programs to make them fun and practical.
I’m a big advocate for financial literacy being taught in school! I was fortunate enough as a kid to have parents that forced me to save. I had to have 2 jobs in high school, one was for fun money and the other was for the bank. Ended up being very helpful when I got older. However, financial literacy takes application and practice to acquire the skill. Many of my friends consistently comment “I wish school taught me how to be good with money”. My answer would you have paid attention anyway? The mobile finance apps seem to be a great way to grab the attention of students and make them want to interact. I would love to see a basic year-long classroom currency set up at the elementary level to expose students to the concepts of saving, selling, trading services, inflation, cost, salary investment, etc. Students are given a paycheck twice a month and have to pay bills and budget according to the lifestyle they want.
Great post Mark!
Mark,
This is such an important topic, and one that isn’t focused on nearly often enough inside and outside of formal education. I was lucky enough in high school to be able to take an economics course, and was introduced to topics relating to financial literacy, but was provided with a more theoretical framework. Similar to Marlis, my parents passed down many of their financial values onto me, but they did so in a way I found really valuable and encourage my friends who have children to model: When I turned 16 and got my driver’s license (US) and was able to drive myself to school my parents set a budget for me. They would provide me with a set amount of money each month, and that dollar amount was determined by the estimates of previous amounts they had spent on me in past years on various areas of life: gas to get to and from school, school supplies, athletic gear, field trips, and my phone bill. As long as I budgeted properly, my necessities (obviously not including food or living expenses) were covered. If there were any other things I wanted to buy or spend money on I had to either go and get a job, babysit for my neighbours, or pull from my own savings account. If there were items I couldn’t pay for with my budget and extra income I had to create a proposal for why my parents “should” help me (i.e. field trips, extracurricular events, a laptop), if/how I would repay them, and the terms for repayment. Additionally, to help me start to build my credit score so I could apply for credit cards in the future and rent apartments more easily, they cosigned with me to get my first credit card with a $500 limit. While it was super frustrating at the time to have to do all of this since I felt my parents were being *so weird*, I really appreciate it now. I still struggled to figure out other aspects of life as a financially independent adult, but I had a great foundation.
I don’t know how realistic it is to ask parents to do this, but if they did so they could also try incorporating the use of apps like Mint or EveryDollar to have their kids use to track their transactions, areas of spending, saving/spending goals, credit score, etc…
Also, while not a formal education method for teaching financial literacy, I did recently make a post about how Animal Crossing: New Horizons can help teach some vital economic lessons: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec523/2021/03/18/is-animal-crossing-educational/ Maybe your nieces and nephews play, and you can talk to them about the lessons 🙂
I do wonder if the accessibility of mobile tech could make it easier for students to be actually involved in their real finances, in addition to games, etc. For instance, when I was a teen I needed my parents to take me to a bank to deposit or withdraw funds. They often ran that errand for me while I was in school.
But if we can give students age-approriate access to funds they could potentially learn by doing much sooner than their 20s. I expect this type of change would happen in the home since there would be all kinds of equity, privacy, and ethical issues to navigate in the classroom. Though, schools could support parents.
Thanks for the reply! That’s a good question, I think that’s something that we won’t learn for a little while, at least until they get older to see what happens. Maybe it’s not the actual game that they would learn from. To share a brief anecdote, I can’t remember what the game was, but my teenage nephew wouldn’t spend some of the credit on his Xbox account for an add-on to make one the guns in his game, maybe Fortnite, to look cooler. Maybe through that they might learn the value of money.
Hello Mark
I agree that financial literacy is sadly lacking in schools. I learned my financial literacy by the modelling of my parents and they passed their values on to me. Being WW2 survivors, their attitude was save everything you could, and only spend what you have – making sure to leave enough for hard times ahead. Buying anything on credit was distasteful, although in their later years they did loosen up some.
Now, attitudes have shifted largely the other way, so using digital technology to appeal to high school students seems quite timely. I didn’t download, but I looked at the trailer for Save the Camp. It almost seems like a more advanced and specific version of ‘Sim City’ where you also had to manage finances and resources.
My question is, how realistic are these finance games, and how well are students translating what they learn in the game life to actual real life?