Sketching a Possible Learning Progression for the Cognitive Component of Financial Education in the Broader Context of Economic Education

Abstract

The teaching in schools of various topics related to the economy has been proposed for different purposes and under different titles, such as economic education (e.g. National Council for Economic Education 2010), consumer education (Benn 2004) and, more recently, financial education (INFE 2012). Designing standards and curricula and implementing intervention studies have mainly involved economists and educators, rather than educational researchers and cognitive and educational psychologists. Economic notions and competences have therefore remained on the fringe of theoretical debates and empirical research on teaching and learning of disciplines. These debates and research have been more focused on natural sciences and mathematics viewed from the perspective of naive theories, developmental sequence and learning progression. In this chapter, I illustrate these notions and show how economic concepts can be introduced into financial education. I present a summary of the literature on children’s understanding of the economic world in the absence of formal instruction. Building on this literature and some intervention studies, I propose a learning progression of economic and financial concepts during K-8 years, that is, a pathway for guiding students to ways of thinking or acting that gradually align with scientific versions, grounded in the results of developmental and instructional research.