Effects of teaching media on developing students' financial literacy

Abstract

Financial education is attracting increasing global attention, and youth has been identified as one of the priority targets in this domain. Many countries have designed and implemented national financial education to boost citizens’, especially young people’s, financial literacy. In mainland China, although the development of financial education is still in its infancy, Chinese students always performed better than their peers in international financial literacy tests, which makes people curious about if there exists an approach of improving financial literacy with Chinese characteristics. There used to be a hypothesis that the better performance of Chinese students largely benefits from China’s effective mathematics education. As a result, the present study tries to explore Mainland China’s financial education from the angle of mathematics education. Systematic application of variation and invariance is regarded as one of tacit principles of teaching mathematics in China. And previous studies also supported teaching with patterns of variation and invariance can improve students’ learning outcomes in some subjects and the learning of certain objects. However, the relationship between the teaching media and the effectiveness of patterns of variation and invariance is still unclear up to now. Based on these, the present study aims to investigate the patterns of variation and invariance which mathematics teachers in Mainland China employ to teach the basic financial concept of interest and its calculation, and to explore to what extent and in what ways the teaching artefacts affect the effectiveness of patterns of variation and invariance on student learning of the basic financial concepts. The study is a pretest-treatment-posttest quasi-experiment, involving one experienced math teacher and two classes of sixth-grade students (84 in total) in Shenzhen. An interest-themed financial course was designed by the teacher and delivered to two classes with the help of different teaching media. In intervention group, teacher was required to deliver the patterns of variation and invariance with technology tools (like computers with teaching-related software) whilst the comparison group used another kind of teaching artefact (like blackboard and chalk) to present the same patterns. The study has two major findings. First, the teacher applied the patterns of variation and invariance in a sequence of “contrast-generalization-fusion” to deliver this financial course. Second, delivering patterns of variation and invariance with the help of technology tools led to better learning outcomes. According to the first finding, high-quality classroom teaching achieved by experienced math teachers could be a reasonable attribution of Chinese students’ excellent performance in international financial tests. In addition, the study also concludes that technology helps to achieve the completeness and variability of teaching examples and patterns of variation and invariance, because compared with teaching with fixed examples delivered in a traditional way, active and changeable teaching examples may help create diverse professional ways of seeing in highly-interactive classrooms.