Fall 2019
September 05, 2019
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!