Description of the programme

The Finance your Future (FYF) programme was created by the Council for Economic Education in America. Its overarching aim was to improve financial knowledge and understanding of high school students aged 14 - 18. Teachers delivered the programme to students in the classroom over two to four weeks with the aid of five DVDs.

The programme covered the following:

• Basic vocabulary and key concepts in personal finance (e.g. savings, wealth building etc.);
• Trade-offs and opportunity costs related to wealth building and money management;
• Banking relationships;
• Topics including credit scores, APR, credit and debt; and
• Financial budgeting, saving, investing and risk tolerance.

For each DVD, there were three printed lesson guides that teachers used alongside the digital content. These lessons included a written outline which guided teachers in presenting ideas and concepts, as well as practical activities and assignments for students to complete.

The FYF intervention was delivered by fifteen teachers who were trained through workshops, provided through the Council for Education’s national network of affiliated state councils or centres, over the course of Autumn 2006. The training was delivered by council or centre staff members with relevant teaching expertise.

The study

One independent impact evaluation of the programme, done by Walstad et al in 2006/7, has been published. This study involved a quasi-experimental design with a comparison group, and a financial knowledge test that was undertaken pre- and post-intervention designed to measure students' understanding of the financial concepts and information covered in the programme. The treatment group was made up of 673 FYF participants and the control group of 127 students who were not involved in the programme.

Key findings

The evaluation (which involved pre and post-measurement amongst both participants and a comparison group) found positive impacts in relation to the following outcomes:

• An increase in the financial knowledge test scores of the participants at the end of the programme. The results showed statistically significant improvements for participants across all five topic areas, whereas no statistically significant improvement was observed between the pre and post-programme scores of the comparison group.

Similar levels of improvement were made by male and female participants. Improvements were highest among the second-year high school students (aged 15-16) compared to the third and fourth year students.

Points to consider

: the course content for FYF was very clearly defined so that it could be taught consistently by teachers across schools.

Full report

Full research report