Unlocking Financial Success: Empowering Higher Ed Students and Developing Financial Literacy Interventions at Scale

Greater financial literacy is critically needed among young adults in the United States [10,35], but many financial literacy education courses have been less effective than hoped for by educators and researchers [7,15]. Additionally, many have not been designed around established curricula or learning science principles, rendering findings difficult for researchers to study empirically [6,34]. In order to better understand the psychosocial mechanisms that predict success in improving learner knowledge and behavior, online educational interventions at scale can be an effective path forward. We conducted interviews with subject matter experts and young adult students to explore the highest priority learning objectives for a brief course curriculum to improve the financial literacy of US young adults. We then leveraged our findings from this study and content from our open-source textbooks to develop the first of several brief online learning interventions for deployment on the large-scale OpenStax Kinetic research infrastructure [2]. In this work-in-progress paper, we discuss the next steps in our research agenda, including course content development and deploying this intervention, as well as our broader plans for our future financial literacy education interventions and translating research into practice with our institutional collaborations.