Posted by: Kathy Griffin
on Oct 16, 2009
In case you missed Eileen Ambrose's article last week "Making Finance Fun?" on learning finance management through games, I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.
Online games can be a good way to acquire some personal finance knowledge because, as Ethan Mollick notes, they are self-directed and experiential: learners can safely experiment for different outcomes in order to understand complex and interrelated concepts. But games as vehicles for learning must be both pedagogically sound and empirically measured before they can claim to be effective. Sound pedagogy means there's a close match between the virtual experience and the skill-set required for success in real life. One could argue that spending virtual money in a virtual world is not a skill that young adults need to practice more. Empirical measures of learning include such time-honored assessment as improvement in quiz and test scores (as Doorways to Dreams has done), and changes in real-world behavior.
Young adults need to acquire some pretty complex skills to be workforce-ready and financially self-sufficient, like how to compare deductibles and co-pays on a healthcare plan, find and understand the Gotchas in their cardholder agreements, complete a 1040EZ, and create a plan for optimal student loan repayment.
Ms. Ambrose overlooked a game that teaches these very skills: MoneyU, which has no affiliation with the financial industry, and is a recipient of Tech & Learning’s prestigious Award of Excellence, as "one of the best education offerings of 2008". Its content and delivery are engagingly objective, frank, and relevant.
MoneyU's pre- and posttest data have been reviewed independently by assessment expert Dr. Jack Naglieri, whose findings demonstrate that MoneyU is significantly effective: no matter how low they score on the pretest, MoneyU's learners have a 98% pass rate on the posttest.
The game is in use in high schools and colleges around the country; check out this recent NBC news piece on St. Joseph College.
Katherine Griffin
Griffin Enterprises
MoneyU.com
