Financial Education in Teacher Training with Technological Support

Abstract

Financial literacy standards based on the recommendations of the OECD are fully implemented into the main curriculum documents of primary and secondary education in the majority of countries. It is clear that teachers should be well prepared for such a situation. Therefore, these standards should be incorporated into curricula of fields of study related to the pre-service and in-service teacher training. In reaction to this demand the Faculty of Education where the authors work launched the subject An Introduction to Finance in the fields of study concerning the teaching of mathematics, the content of which reflects the five factors emphasizing the importance of financial literacy that were defined in the OECD document Improving Financial Literacy. The chapter is based on the authors’ experience in the teaching of this subject. It mainly presents methods of computer support of financial education that the authors developed, together with the results of research that was carried out on students over several years. In addition to the usual computer means of financial computation such as spreadsheet and online calculators, the authors discovered the utilization of the computer algebra system Maple to be beneficial. Therefore, the use of the so-called smart documents, which are created in this software, to introduce students of mathematics teaching to the nature of basic financial issues will also be presented in the chapter.