Over the past several years, UCFEI has been following financial education research, developing and testing new tools, and closely examining program outcomes. It has become increasingly clear that any intervention aimed at ultimately improving financial knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes in adults must start very early as children begin forming healthy habits that contribute to financial success at a young age. The foundation is laid early in a child’s life, and the skills needed to excel can’t solely be taught to teenagers during a brief window in time. To better prepare children for their future, UCFEI is proud to announce an expansion in our focus: the development of financial education tools for young children.

These tools will incorporate executive functioning skills that will put children on track to succeed not only in financial education but also in many other critical areas. By introducing financial education earlier, we’re confident we can give children even more runway to:

• Learn how to set and work toward goals,
• Consider the consequences of different choices,
• Navigate unexpected challenges,
• Build confidence talking about money,
• Learn with and from family and community members, and
• Reflect on past choices and learn how to plan for the future.

UChicago Financial Education Initiative believes that financial education is essential for everyone to succeed in a changing world. We are committed advocates for high-quality, research-based, rigorous, and tested financial education.

We’ll keep you updated on our journey toward impactful financial education for all ages through our newsletter.

If you have any questions or would like to hear more about our work, please contact UCFEI at financialeducation@uchicago.edu.

For a second year, Jackson Charitable Foundation is supporting the University of Chicago Financial Education Initiative to provide 100 teachers and approximately 5,000 high school students with free access to finEDge, a semester-long financial education curriculum. This sponsorship will provide students and teachers access to the high-quality curriculum, along with extensive professional development for participating educators.

Developed by UChicago Financial Education Initiative, with the support of its anchor sponsor Magnetar Capital Foundation, finEDge provides students with opportunities to develop positive behaviors and practice making financial decisions. Additionally, the program offers a robust teacher professional learning portfolio that includes virtual professional development, a professional learning course for educators, and access to an online community of financial education teachers. The goal is to provide opportunities that emphasize pedagogy, teacher content knowledge, and sharing and reflection with fellow educators.

"Research tells us teachers often feel unprepared to teach this subject matter," said Danielle Robinson, Executive Director, Jackson Charitable Foundation. "finEDge's high-quality, wrap-around curriculum, paired with professional development, gives educators the support they need to improve students' financial futures."

"We know that when teachers participate in our program it not only changes their thinking about how to most effectively teach financial education, but it also changes their thinking about their own finances," said Rebecca Maxcy, Director of UChicago Financial Education Initiative. "We're grateful for Jackson Charitable Foundation's support and look forward to the opportunity to work with more teachers to continue to have an impact."

High school financial education teachers nationwide can apply now for FREE access to finEDge during the 2022–23 academic year. Interested educators can apply online: https://bit.ly/3yQNAAw. Applications are reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis, with all 100 available sponsorships awarded to schools in Fall 2022 for the 2022–23 academic year. Priority is given to educators new to teaching financial education.

We are excited to share our new digital games—the latest offering for finEDge teachers. The finEDge digital games are uniquely effective tools for promoting the adoption of productive behaviors and attitudes. The games are designed to be used as part of the finEDge program and are accompanied by lessons to guide integration of learning from the games with learning from the corresponding modules.

Learn more about the background and key components in this video.

The five games include:

— Quest, a journey game that requires players to make wise saving and spending decisions in order to complete a mission;

— Realm, a fantasy game where borrowing decisions impact players’ ability to harness the awesome power of a mystical substance called fire fog;

— Working Like a Dog, a character-driven game that allows players to explore job-related decisions by taking on the personas of different job-seeking dogs;

— Squirrelled Away, a choice-based game that involves a squirrel character making risk-management decisions about protecting his acorns from wild raiders; and

— Voyager, a space fantasy game that helps players explore the relative benefits and pitfalls of passive versus active investing.

finEDge teachers can access the games, the lesson plans, and the games-specific professional development session on the Virtual Learning Community (VLC).

We are excited to announce that this fall, Jackson Charitable Foundation is supporting the University of Chicago Financial Education Initiative to provide 100 teachers and approximately 5,000 high school students with free access to finEDge, a semester-long financial education curriculum designed by the University of Chicago in partnership with the Magnetar Capital Foundation. Targeting teachers new to teaching financial education, this sponsorship will provide students and teachers access to the high-quality curriculum along with extensive professional development and certification for participating educators.

Who: High school educators nationwide who are new to teaching financial education can apply now for complimentary access to finEDge during the 2021–22 academic year. Local school districts and interested parents are advised to share this information immediately with high school educators who may be interested in applying.

What: finEDge is a semester-long financial education curriculum designed by educators, researchers, and curriculum developers at the University of Chicago Financial Education Initiative in partnership with the Magnetar Capital Foundation. The underlying philosophy of the program is to teach sound financial decision-making rather than simply transmit financial information and facts. The research-based curriculum is focused on developing students’ knowledge while fostering productive attitudes and behaviors around money. Simultaneously, finEDge strengthens teachers’ content knowledge and confidence by providing professional development and ongoing support. With a serious respect for the personal situation of each student, the curriculum responsibly acknowledges and addresses the range of financial learners’ realities and economic environments, including systemic barriers and inequities.

Where: Interested educators can apply online: https://bit.ly/3e8JP1f

When: Applications are reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis, with all 100 available sponsorships awarded to schools by August 20, 2021 for the 2021–22 academic year.

This school year, the finEDge team has been holding teacher-to-teacher sharing sessions on a bimonthly basis. These sessions allow teachers an opportunity to share strategies, routines, and tools they have found most effective and useful for teaching in virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments. Without the typical daily interaction with colleagues, teachers have been seeking ways to connect and share ideas with each other as they navigate the unique challenges of the 2020–21 school year. Each sharing session is centered around a theme, such as engaging students online or managing assessments; however, all sessions are open for anything teachers want to share or ask about.

Next month's teacher-to-teacher sharing sessions are scheduled for March 9th and 23rd from 4:00–4:30 PM CT. Please join us!

New for the 2020-21 school, the Chicago Public Schools Department of Social Sciences and Civic Engagement and the UChicago Financial Education Initiative have launched a first of its kind pilot of a financial education curriculum to evaluate how to strengthen student agency in financial literacy and decision-making for Chicago’s youth.

For the year-long pilot, a leadership cohort of 28 educators from across Chicago Public Schools will use finEDge, a research-based, tested, comprehensive financial education curriculum developed by UChicago. The pilot's goal is to investigate how financial education materials can best meet the needs of Chicago students and classrooms.

Teachers in the leadership cohort will build financial education instruction into their classes and share their findings and best practices in collaboration with other cohort members, CPS, and UChicago. We are very excited about this new partnership and look forward to educating the youth of Chicago.

Financial decisions are serious. They can have long-term effects on well-being, including health, happiness, and relationship quality. But that doesn’t mean learning to make financial decisions can’t be fun.

For the past few months, the finEDge team has been developing five digital games to supplement the curriculum materials. The games include:

— Quest, a journey game that requires players to make wise saving and spending decisions in order to complete a mission.

— Realm, a fantasy game where borrowing decisions impact players’ ability to harness the awesome power of a mystical substance called fire fog.

— Working Like a Dog, a character-driven game that allows players to explore job-related decisions by taking on the personas of different job-seeking dogs.

— Squirrel It Away, a choice-based game that involves a squirrel character making risk-management decisions about protecting his acorns from wild raiders.

These games were designed after intensive research on effective game-based learning and principles of behavioral change. They are aligned with specific learning objectives in the curriculum modules and have accompanying lesson guides to help teachers implement and debrief each game.

These five games will be field-tested this fall in classrooms. If you are interested in participating in the field test, please contact Jenn Hockema at jhockema [at] uchicago [dot] edu.

Is your district still determining plans for the fall? Is it unclear if the school year will begin with in-person classes or distance learning? It’s okay—we have you covered either way!

A digital version of the finEDge curriculum will be ready for the fall semester. finEDge teachers will receive access later this summer. Teacher training for the online platform will take place July 30–31, 2020 at the virtual Summer Institute. If you haven’t registered for the Summer Institute, please do so here.

We are pleased to announce that finEDge is now available through the Kendall Hunt Publishing Company. This exciting, new partnership will help expand finEDge to reach more teachers and students across the country.

Learn more about the partnership.

<a href="https://k12.kendallhunt.com/program/finedge-navigating-financial-decisions ">Bring finEDge to your school.

Supporting teachers has always been a central goal of the UChicago Financial Education Initiative. Our team is constantly working to improve the portfolio of resources we provide financial educators. And this fall, a key component of that portfolio just got a major upgrade.

For several years, finEDge teachers have had access to an online professional learning course (PLC) that focuses on improving financial content knowledge. The course has now been completely redesigned and rewritten to align with the new finEDge curriculum materials. It also provides a more interactive, engaging learning experience! Learners complete game-like activities and work through scenarios to learn and apply financial content in multiple domains.

The course offers the following features:

— Content modules aligned to the domains covered in the finEDge curriculum:

— Financial Decision-Making in Context

— Saving & Spending

— Borrowing

— Earning

— Investing

— Managing Risk

— A pre-post quiz to assess growth from taking the course

— A certificate of completion

Teachers, check out the new PLC today! It’s available at https://finedge.uchicago.edu/teachers/course/modules.

Over the past several years, the finEDge team studied many different sets of relevant standards and used them as an integral foundation for developing the program’s philosophy, specific lesson and activity sequences, and instructional routines.

After the development of the program materials, available national and state standards were used in a different way—to create lesson-level standards alignment documents. So far, we have completed alignments for eight states as well as the national standards developed by the Council for Economic Education (CEE) and the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy!

The benefits of these alignment documents are two-fold: (1) They provide an opportunity for the finEDge developers to communicate the match between the program’s philosophy and standards in financial literacy to teachers, school officials, and others. (2) Teachers and administrators can use the alignments as tools to ensure that the finEDge lessons are meeting—or will meet, if the program is under consideration—the needs of their students as well as the requirements of their states.

It is important to acknowledge that standards alignment, by nature, is an interpretative process. Many thanks to the officials who provided us with valuable insight into the intent of their specific standards as we strove to create accurate and meaningful alignments. We will continue to reach out to other representatives in the near future to gain additional input.

Visit https://finedge.uchicago.edu/explore-the-program/standards-alignment to view available alignments and to learn more about our approach to the process. If your state has been marked as “available soon,” please check back as we continue to update our work!

The UChicago team spent the past year working closely with 60+ teachers and over 3,000 students who field tested and piloted the new program, finEDge. During this time, the team collected data on student and teacher knowledge and attitudes related to finance. These data were used to improve the finEDge materials during the development process.

Now that we’ve had a chance to analyze all the data we collected, we thought we’d share how the program has impacted finEDge students. Relevant data are reported in the evidence and results section of our website, representing preliminary findings from this research conducted during field-testing and piloting of the materials.

finEDge students indicate they have the understanding, tools, strategies, and confidence needed to make sound financial decisions. Given the results, we are confident that teachers using finEDge are helping prepare students to navigate today’s complex financial world.

Many thanks to all the teachers who provided us with feedback and helped make finEDge extraordinary.

We are pleased to announce the official release of finEDge, a new and unique single-semester high school financial education program. Thanks to all the field-test teachers, pilot teachers, and reviewers for bringing finEDge to life. Your thoughtful feedback helped to enhance the materials and impact the lives of students.

Help us reach more students and teachers!

Please visit the new website: finedge.uchicago.edu

We’re back at it! This fall we’ve been back out field testing…this time with our digital tools.

All digital components are available via the teacher and student portals. These tools include various types of calculators; videos; personal inventories related to attitudes, values, and risk disposition; and the heart of the program--the financial well-being map.

Just as with the print materials, we’re conducting a thorough field test of the digital materials. Currently over 31 teachers and 1,300 students in 7 states are testing out the tools. We collect initial feedback on each tool via surveys. Based on this feedback, we propose ideas for improving each tool during feedback webinars with our digital field test teachers. We take this information back to our digital team and work together to make improvements.

The digital team is busy ensuring the functionality for every school. As you can imagine, with numerous devices it can be a challenge. We are now in the process of enhancing the look and design of each tool to increase user-friendliness. We’re excited to roll out the new look for each tool over the next few months.

Many thanks to our field test teachers and students. We always enjoy talking with you and looking for ways we can continue to improve the materials. We truly value your feedback – you’ve really helped us make this program better.

It’s been a busy summer for the Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative team, as we have been revising the first version of the new curriculum. We take pride in our extensive and rigorous revision process, which requires us to collect and analyze thousands of pages of feedback. The feedback comes from a number of sources, which include classroom observations, videotape footage from classrooms, teacher feedback on every lesson, student workbook responses, and feedback from independent reviewers.

For each financial education lesson, team members review the feedback, recommend improvements to the lesson, and collectively decide how to best incorporate the feedback and recommendations. Sometimes navigating differences in feedback can be challenging, but it helps us to see the curriculum in new ways and find creative solutions to improve the curriculum for everyone.

Special thanks to our spring field-test teachers, who provided us with rich feedback that we are incorporating into the latest version of the curriculum. We are looking forward to hearing what our fall field-test teachers have to say about the digital tools that we added to the curriculum. You can be sure that we will take your feedback seriously.

The 2017 - 18 school year has been our busiest yet! Thank you to all our partners and supporters for another successful year. We are excited to share with you the many milestones our program achieved, as well as our plans for the upcoming school year.

Our program hit record heights this school year, as we continue to grow and expand! In all, we served 68 schools, 87 teachers, and 4,735 students during the 2017-18 school year--our most to date. We expanding to new cities for the 2018-19 school year --including cities in Missouri, Tennessee, and Central Illinois.

Perhaps our biggest, most exciting update: We successfully wrote and field tested our first version of new curriculum! The curriculum is relevant, rigorous, research-based, and responsive to dynamic changes in the financial world. It is also enjoyable to teach, as it is rich with simulations and opportunities for discussion and reflection. We promise you have never seen anything like it!

Special thanks to our teachers who field-tested our curriculum and provided us with rich feedback. You can learn more about our engineering approach to curriculum design here.

Northside College Prep won the 6th Annual Magnetar Academy Team Challenge at Navy Pier on Saturday, March 10th, taking home a school grant of $5,000. This year's competition was the biggest yet, with 400 students representing 48 teams from 34 high schools. Deerfield High School placed second, taking home a $2,500 grant, and Lincoln Park High School placed third for $1,000. The Financial Literacy Quiz winner was Whitney Young Magnet High School.

The trading challenge gave students a unique opportunity to experience what it's like to trade stocks in a simulated competition. The simulation lasted two hours and covered 120 days of historical market data—broken down into two 60-minute sessions. Teams began the day with $100,000 in their portfolios to invest from a pool of over 100 stocks. Profit and loss updates were given every few minutes. Teams built their portfolios using a trading application on a desktop computer. Roughly 50 financial service professionals from Chicago-area firms served as team coaches.

For more highlights, check out Team Challenge 2018: A Recap Told Through Social Media.

Session 2 of our fall semester professional development was a full and exciting day. With 33 teachers and eight members of the UChicago team in attendance, along with a professional photographer, a film maker, and a public relations associate from Magnetar, the seventh floor of the Northern Trust building in downtown Chicago was unusually busy for a Saturday.

Goals for the day included exploring the effective use of scenarios and simulations in a financial education classroom, preparing to dive into investing in Units 3 and 4, and strengthening our instructor community. John Anders and his students at Rauner College Prep generously invited us into their classroom to film their engagement in a scenario from Unit 1 Lesson 4. The video greatly enhanced our in-depth look at scenarios. Our focus on teaching investment considered best practices and key concepts. Teachers had the opportunity to get to know each other and work together in break-out sessions, including participating in an investment simulation, planning for implementing scenarios in their classrooms, exploring the Virtual Learning Community, and participating in a focus group to provide input for the new curriculum. Additionally, teachers who are field-testing the new curriculum met with members of the UChicago team to prepare to implement the first module in their classrooms. Veteran teachers met with teachers new to the Magnetar Academy and shared information about additional Academy experiences, such as the Alumni Investment Competition and the Team Challenge.

Thank you to all who participated in this action-packed day!

A key goal of the program is to provide a space for Magnetar Academy teachers to learn from each other and to form a community around financial education. This fall, we furthered that goal by introducing a new online community for Magnetar Academy teachers! This Virtual Learning Community (VLC), available on the Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative website, offers three key supports to teachers:

• A Resources page where teachers can view and share instructional tools, planning tools, and other materials.
• A Discussion page where teachers can ask critical questions of other educators and the UChicago staff behind the curriculum.
• A MyPage where teachers can create and organize a library of useful resources.

Just a few months after launch, the Virtual Learning Community is already beginning to take shape. Teachers are having great conversations about topics like teaching budgeting and how to pay for college and they are sharing teaching resources. We look forward to seeing the Community grow over the next few years and encourage you to participate!

This summer we released an updated version of Magnetar Academy that addresses many of the “pain points” that teachers identified. The new version of the Magnetar Academy curriculum includes extensive revisions. Highlights include:

• Cumulative Projects: End-of-unit projects provide opportunities for students to apply key concepts and for teachers to assess student learning.Project lessons include differentiation suggestions, student instructions, and task-specific rubrics.
• More Relevant Budgeting Lessons: New and revised activities make budgeting more relevant to students by providing opportunities for students to connect budgeting to their own lives in a meaningful way.
• Consumer Focus: Revised activities provide more opportunities for students to play the role of the consumer.
• Slide Decks: Updated slide decks accompanying each lesson are customizable to meet individual classroom needs.
• Up-to-Date Curriculum: The materials are now timely and current, with updated references and data.
• More Media: More videos and additional links are included to make it easier to extend lessons.
• Student Workbook: Student handouts have been reorganized into workbooks so students can have a collection of their work. Request student copies through our website.
• Better PDFs: All digital materials have been reorganized to make downloading for the classroom easier.
• Standards Alignment: New Introduction Documents include detailed alignment to the Illinois Social Science Standards (2016), the Illinois Consumer Education Standards (2015), and the Common Core Reading Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects (2010). Also included are updated alignments to two sets of national financial literacy standards: Jump$tart’s National Standards in K-12 Personal Finance Education (2015), and the Council for Economic Education’s National Standards for Financial Literacy (2013).
• Lesson Redesign: Lesson structure has been redesigned for ease of use and clarity. In every lesson, miniature images of student handouts are included at point of use, questions to students are clearly identified, and answers to discussion questions and student handouts are provided.

The Magnetar Academy website has a new look! In early April the Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative unveiled a new project website at https://financialeducation.uchicago.edu. The site was created to streamline communications with students, teachers, parents, and the public, as well as to recognize the long-term partnership between Magnetar Capital and the University of Chicago to improve financial education nationwide.

The new website offers:

• An overview of the Financial Education Initiative’s mission, services, and team;
• An archive of Initiative newsletters;
• A user-friendly teacher portal, with all curriculum materials and resources available at point-of-use;
• An online, user-tested professional learning course for teachers;
• A place for interested educators to see inside the materials and learn more about adopting the program;
• A space for students to track ongoing opportunities and get excited.

More features will come over time, including a virtual learning community for teachers to collaborate and share resources!

All are welcome to explore the site and learn more. We encourage current Magnetar Academy teachers to sign up for a site account. Once confirmed, a site account will provide access to all the new materials, resources, and information we are making available to educators.

The Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative recently debuted one of its first major new products: an online professional learning course for financial literacy teachers! The course offers five modules on key financial content:

1. saving and spending, 
2. employment and income,
3. credit,
4. investing, and
5. risk management and insurance.

Each module is designed to draw on teachers’ preexisting knowledge and experience with finance, and to build teachers’ confidence in the content they will be teaching to students. The course is currently being tested by a small group of pilot teachers and will be offered to all Magnetar Academy teachers in the fall of 2017.

Initiative staff developed the course over the past year. We started by identifying fundamental content in each domain and defining the big ideas associated with it that Magnetar Academy teachers need to know. We also explored various platforms for delivering high-quality learning experiences online. Over time, we built five online modules to help teachers master the content actively through video lessons, applications, reflection questions, and self-assessments. 

Our online course is just one part of the Initiative’s ongoing efforts to build teacher community and provide top-notch professional development. Next school year, the Initiative will offer a suite of professional development supports, including the content-focused online course, two days of in-person, pedagogy-centered workshops, and an online community space where Magnetar Academy teachers can share ideas and resources. The Initiative will also continue holding social events for teachers, including dinners and cocktail hours, making for rich and inspirational interaction between teachers and Initiative staff.

The Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative was launched in July 2016 to develop the tools, resources, and capacity to spread robust financial education across America. The Initiative will oversee and expand Magnetar Academy, a comprehensive financial education course for Chicagoland high school students, coupled with professional development and networks for financial education teachers and strategic support for schools and districts seeking to ensure their graduates are financially empowered. Originally created by Magnetar Capital, an Evanston-based investment firm, the program has reached more than 5,500 high school students in about 300 Chicago area high school classrooms.

Housed at UChicago STEM Education, the Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial Education Initiative will tap into the group’s expertise in learning science, curriculum design, digital tool development, assessment, and experience with schools and districts.

Much of the summer and early fall was spent transitioning the project to the University of Chicago. Jenn Hockema and Charu Gupta are now part of the team here at the University along with some new staff members.

We spent time getting to know all aspects of the program. The team identified the external pieces of the curriculum currently in Magnetar Academy materials and began a coordinated effort to gain permissions for copyrighted materials, since the work is housed at the university.

In addition, we inventoried and decided on the status of certain program features. As we wrote to you earlier this fall, we’ve eliminated a few features (Schwab accounts) and have begun work on new elements that we’ll be updating you about periodically.

Last spring and again this fall, we’ve been out in schools observing Magnetar in action! An important part of designing and improving curriculum and associated teacher supports is observing and connecting with implementing teachers and students in classrooms. This work:

• Allows development staff to see and feel how the materials are enacted;
• Ensures that designs mesh with local and practical classroom needs;
• Strengthens relationships, to leverage improvement efforts down the road.

We look forward to seeing your classroom and hearing your thoughts about the program.

Best wishes for the New Year!

The Magnetar Capital UChicago Financial
Education Initiative Team