Building the Financial Education Capacity of Teachers: Does It Make a Difference?
This chapter explores the preparation of educators to teach personal finance and professional development programmes designed to build their financial education capacity. Teachers cannot teach personal finance well if they do not understand it themselves
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Building the Financial Education Capacity of Teachers: Does It Make a Difference? Barbara M. O’Neill and Billy J. Hensley
Abstract This chapter explores the preparation of educators to teach personal finance and professional development programmes designed to build their financial education capacity. Teachers cannot teach personal finance well if they do not understand it themselves and/or cannot engage their students. Unfortunately, there is evidence that many teachers lack content knowledge obtained through both formal and informal educational experiences. As various countries have adopted financial literacy mandates in the wake of the global financial crisis, interest has increased in providing quality teacher professional development experiences and documenting their impact. This chapter begins with an introduction about general financial literacy challenges and growing interest in financial education, followed by a literature review about teacher financial education competency levels. Also included are studies of personal finance teacher training programmes and their impacts. The chapter then describes the content and format of two recent U.S. financial education professional development programme models. Assessments of the impact of these financial education training programmes are discussed including specific methods of measuring changes in teachers’ knowledge and confidence. The chapter ends with recommendations about teacher training for policy and practice.
Keywords Financial literacy Financial education professional development Programme evaluation
Teacher training Teachers’
B.M. O’Neill (&) Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, Rutgers University, Cook Office Building Room-107, 55 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] B.J. Hensley National Endowment for Financial Education, Denver, USA © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 C. Aprea et al. (eds.), International Handbook of Financial Literacy, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0360-8_40
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B.M. O’Neill and B.J. Hensley
Introduction
Perhaps at no other time in history has the need for financial education been as great as it is today. The global financial crisis clearly demonstrated what can happen when people do not understand complex financial instruments (e.g. option ARM loans and derivative securities). In addition, many people are increasingly responsible for making complex financial decisions (e.g. selecting a health insurance plan) and self-funding retirement savings plans. The latter includes decisions about where (e.g. growth mutual funds) and how much money to invest and how to structure asset withdrawals during retirement so that accumulated savings lasts a lifetime. Add to this, record amounts of household debt and low savings rates in many countries, eroding government and employer financial supports (e.g. defined benefit pensions), increasingly sophisticated financial scams, and scores of studies describing low financial knowledge levels and poor financial behaviours and it is clear that
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