Your Personal Finance Exam Study Guide Will Keep You Focused
Without the right structure, learning a new subject can be overwhelming. That’s why you need a personal finance exam study guide. A good study guide helps you maintain focus and avoid distractions.
A well-designed exam study guide will include a personal finance pre-assessment to give you a baseline to compare future test results. The pre-assessment tells us where we started at the beginning of the course. The NFEC offers complimentary testing. Select and complete your exam, then review the results that will be emailed to you.
A Personal Finance Exam Study Guide Should Cover Five Main Aspects of Financial Literacy
Many personal finance pre-assessments focus too heavily on financial knowledge and fail to measure a person’s deep fundamental relationship with money. These measures include a person’s attitude toward money, called financial sentiment; and how a person behaves with money, called financial behavior. These personal aspects of money have powerful influence on a person’s financial situation and can affect many areas of life, so they should be included in the personal finance exam answers.
Another challenge for the exam guide is to accurately measure improvement in the students’ financial situation after the personal finance course concludes. Participant bias tends to skew the results because after the program, people may think their financial situations are better than the reality indicates. Measuring the actual financial situation removes participant bias.
A Personal Finance Exam Study Guide and Pre-Assessment to Determine Depth of Knowledge
A good personal finance course will include a study guide and pre-assessment designed to determine how well participants understand what they already know. Webb’s Depth of Knowledge chart and Bloom’s Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking Skills are different yet corresponding scales that measure depth of understanding. When students can remember and reproduce new knowledge, they can start applying what they’ve learned. It’s important to measure results on the personal finance exam closely to assess progress toward this goal. The next steps in Bloom’s Taxonomy are analyzing, evaluating, and finally creating. If students are asked to evaluate before they can analyze, they may lose self-confidence.
Learn more about the NFEC’s Personal Finance Curriculum.
