Teaching Financial Literacy at Any Grade Level
When students learn about personal finance topics like budgeting and interest rates, it can lead to financial benefits that last well into adulthood.
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Go to My Saved Content.Financial literacy has become a big topic in recent years, with many schools taking concrete steps to integrate it into the K–12 curriculum. This is a welcome trend, as research shows that learning about personal finance leads to widespread benefits when students enter the adult world—from less debt and greater savings to higher credit scores. There are many ways to teach personal finance and integrate lessons on topics like budgeting, taxes, and interest rates into coursework, regardless of subject or age level. Here are five engaging and easy-to-deploy ideas to try out this year to help young people build better money management skills.
To learn more about the research cited in the video, check out the links below.
- Jeremy Burke, J. Michael Collins, and Carly Urban’s study of how state-mandated financial education affects financial well-being (2020)
- John Pelletier’s report on states’ efforts to improve financial literacy in high schools (2023)
- Carly Urban, Maximilian Schmeiser, J. Michael Collins, and Alexandra Brown’s study into the effects of high school personal financial education on students’ future financial behavior (2020)
For more insights into the research on personal finance education and its benefits, read Daniel Leonard’s feature article for Edutopia “Teaching Kids to Manage Money Yields Big Returns, Research Says.” To learn more about the needs-versus-wants game—and Piggy Bank Fridays—check out the 2016 video filmed at Walter Bracken STEAM Academy Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more details on the bean game (and access to a lesson plan and PDF printout in both English and Spanish), watch the 2023 video filmed at Parkdale High School in Riverdale, Maryland. And for more information about a salary-based finance project in Colorado teacher Pamela Kranz’s middle school math class, read “How Financial Literacy Can Engage and Motivate Reluctant Math Students.” Edutopia’s topic page on teaching financial literacy has lots of useful resources, too.