Research · Issue area · Financial Education Measurement
Behavioral Measurement in Personal-Finance Education
About 30 states now require high-school students to take a personal-finance course, but curricula are rarely tested against students' later financial outcomes. What measurement-grade evidence shows which approaches actually predict how people manage money as adults?
Rigorous measurement and outcome-grounded research for the personal-finance curricula that schools now depend on.
About this issue area
About 30 U.S. states now require a standalone personal-finance course for high-school graduation (Next Gen Personal Finance, 2026). The policy momentum has outpaced the research on whether course-level approaches predict adult financial outcomes — savings, credit management, retirement readiness and resilience to financial stress.
The Institute of FAME studies how financial-education outcomes can be measured well: measurement built specifically for financial decisions, tested in the populations it is used with, and designed to be shared openly with the field.
Research questions in this area include: which student-level behaviors predict adult financial outcomes; which classroom approaches change those behaviors and which do not; how measurement tools can be checked for predictive validity in the populations they are used with; and how measurement evidence should inform state and federal financial-education policy.
Plain-language explainer
What this means for you
Picture a ninth-grader in a personal-finance class. The curriculum may have been written years ago. The retirement plan she'll be offered at 22, and the buy-now-pay-later app she'll see at 19, may not have existed when it was written. Much of what researchers have learned about how young people actually make financial decisions never made it into her textbook.
Most states now require personal finance for graduation. That is a meaningful commitment. But we know little about which classroom approaches predict how students later save, borrow and plan for retirement, or whether the materials hold up against the financial products today's teenagers will actually face.
Measuring that well is slow, careful work, and the research that does it mostly lives in academic journals curriculum writers rarely read. Your support funds measurement research and the translation that puts it in front of the people writing the next generation of personal-finance curricula.
Forthcoming outputs
- — Policy brief on measuring the outcomes of personal-finance education (planned)
Policy audiences for this work
- State Departments of Education with personal-finance graduation requirements
- U.S. Department of Education
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of Financial Education
- FINRA Investor Education Foundation
- Council for Economic Education
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