The fourth step in the evaluation framework analyzes the effect, or benefits, financial education has on students in the short or medium-term. This step involves a more formal research design to ensure the benefits students have experienced, such as gains in financial knowledge and confidence, can be attributed to financial education.
This may include changes in students’ financial knowledge as well as their confidence in applying this knowledge. The National Endowment for Financial Education has developed a Financial Education Outcomes Hierarchy that defines measurable outcomes from immediate to long-term impact.
In addition to administering a pre- and post-test to students in a financial education program, the same pre- and post-test can be administered to a group of students who do not take the course, also known as the control group. This group of students is used to measure what happens to financial literacy levels or confidence of participants if they receive no financial education. The control group should have similar backgrounds and demographics as the group of students in the treatment group. This evaluation set-up helps to minimize external factors by showing what would have happened to the students if they had not received any instruction in financial education. You can read more about different evaluation designs in the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) manual.
A simple but effective evaluation strategy is to administer an assessment at the start and end of a program or course. The same test can be used and results can be compared to measure what improvements were made as a result of the program. Note that while this evaluation provides evidence of a correlation, or relationship, there may be other external factors that cause a change in the post-test results. For example, if there is flu going around the school and a lot of students miss class, results may show financial education had no impact on student knowledge. A lot of financial education curricula includes assessments, for example Take Charge Today.
The evaluations of High School Planning Program or Financial Fitness for Life curricula are good examples.
The OECD has developed a guide to evaluating financial education programs. In this guide, the evaluation cycle is broken down into three steps: planning, implementing, and reporting evaluations.
