UT Extension receives grant to assess personal finance classes

UT Extension receives grant to assess personal finance classes

The challenge will contain conducting a wants evaluation in cooperation with Tennessee educators chargeable for educating personal finance to college students.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee requires profitable completion of a stand-alone personal finance course for highschool commencement. 

The requirement has been in place for Tennessee’s graduating highschool college students for almost a decade, and now a crew with the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences on the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture is embarking on a rigorous two-year study inspecting critically vital traits of economic training because it occurs within the classroom.

The examine is funded by a $207,377 grant from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investor Education Foundation (FINRA Foundation).

The challenge, “Listening to Learn,” will present insights to improve the effectiveness of highschool personal finance programs, which give youth with the data and abilities to higher handle their assets. 

The challenge will contain conducting a wants evaluation in cooperation with Tennessee educators chargeable for educating personal finance to college students. The info collected will embrace the assets and curricula academics are at present utilizing, academics’ views about personal finance training and college students’ response to the classes, academics’ perceptions about monetary points going through their college students, challenges of educating the classes and steps that may be taken to enhance monetary training. 

The examine will look intently at high-poverty faculties and the way monetary training in such faculties compares to that in additional prosperous excessive faculties. The examine will even look at approaches to monetary training for particular wants college students.

The info gathered will inform methods for supporting the efforts of economic academics in Tennessee and past. Further, the examine methodology will function a springboard for related analysis in different states.

The challenge’s principal investigator, Ann Berry, is a UT Extension professor of Family and Consumer Sciences.

“This challenge and the beneficiant funding from the sponsor organizations will assist our crew higher perceive the panorama of personal finance instruction in Tennessee excessive faculties,” Berry stated.  “This info is crucial to creating assets and finest practices associated to monetary training for youth.”