 This session we are happy to introduce a terrific session called pilot study Immersive financial education for building positive money habits and our speaker today is Cheryl Moore Is financial capability educator Sefq at the a New York State come all and let's begin our session Cheryl Hi everybody. Thank you very much for staying here, and I hope you enjoy the session I'm going to start with telling you a little bit about myself what I do professionally Why that's important and also how then of course how we can work that into the virtual world So first as introduced I am a financial capability Educator and instructional designer for Sefq, which is a is the credit union New York State We have a specific division at Sefq Which is called the Institute for financial well-being and that's dedicated to providing free financial education to our members And we're actually working to build a nationwide model. So that's That's my professional work we never charge and We're not driving for product sales Instead, it's facts like these that you see on the screen that are what motivated Sefq to create the Institute for financial well-being When considering these statistics, it's important to understand that there are other related circumstances, of course But those would include things like excessive debt living You know individuals living paycheck to paycheck lack of retirement savings, and these are not positive circumstances 55% of American households have less than one month of income and savings and 70% spend more than they earn and or have 41% of their income spent on debt So of course, this is not sustainable for individual change. So a solution approach that meets a person at their point of need Is built on driving for behavior change. It's rooted in building self-efficacy It employs social cognitive theory to build capacity and it's not tied to financial products and services like loans or credit cards those things are often associated as financial education Referred to as financial literacy, and it's it's not really the same thing Our approach is rooted in these principles and again, we focus on the behavior and the capability building capability So working with this information in the virtual space is really great because people can practice in a safe environment Without worrying about all the real world types of failure possibilities, right? So we get a little bit amped up about that. I think sometimes so my design with the island was to put some humor involved use dynamic visuals and Build a space that's as I said before safe and puts people at ease for learning and it's fun So principles of financial education can be very simple. We work from key concepts of savings budgeting or excuse me saving budgeting debt spending and sharing and What you see here is an example of a simple but useful practical and memorable Tool that serves to guide behavior through measure of how much income should be spent in these categories 30-20 rule provides focus and direction for starting a budget and controlling cash flow my work at CefQ and my studies at Empire State College, which I'm currently completing the What's called the mallet program? It's masters in learning and emerging technologies or learning with emerging technologies The pilot study was made as a part of the final project for that degree so what you're seeing here is is an aerial view of the island I designed with this purpose and working in these spaces and In the context of well, I put it in the context of my my professional work It allowed me to envision a purpose, right? so I immediately connected with the idea of potential for engaging people in financial education and Particularly a real opportunity for engaging youth with principles of financial well-being and developing Sense of the behaviors needed for achieving future financial independence That's really the focus when we when we consider what is important for youth so the island is called pixelated and again, that was made really for the Soul purpose of the initial purpose for my mallet degree Additional approach of the content and island design involve elements that are shown on the slide These are all very easily achieved in an immersive space. I Designed the island around very common ways that people spend money. So this makes it relatable. I Aimed to avoid social bias and it encourages positive money habits The grocery decisions for example are centered around taking care of the family for the week while making healthy choices so balancing a Balance by earning life points and that was a guideline within the lesson that I designed for the island and the project There are many choices on the island by design in the interest of problem-solving and offering free will with the decision-making Items may be cheaper in the department store, for example, but clothing can also be purchased in a boutique Maybe you'd have somewhat cooler items in the boutique, but it would be more expensive this type of structure reinforces prioritization of needs and wants and it's rooted in the question of How do today's decisions impact my finances for tomorrow or in the future? Shown here are the two objectives related to self-efficacy and behavior change and these were used to identify a change in attitude and confidence the learners engaged in behaviors of shopping with autonomy Following a shopping list and prioritizing needs and wants and keeping financial records The study took place in a 90-minute block in which we had 17 adult participants in a blended environment There was a brief time window for in-world practice and kind of an orientation with the tools before the lesson Learners were then reassembled in the theater that you see here for a brief lesson on budgeting and the importance of being purposeful with money The learners then gathered to the information center where they oriented themselves with directions and the shopping list the list contained a combination of purchases that covered needs wants sharing and Also provided or kind of directed people to Keeping records and paying debt This is the shopping list that was used the financial decisions here teach budgeting saving and prioritization prioritization of needs and wants While enabling autonomous decision-making and problem-solving Learners were set free to accomplish the tasks on the list and here you can see learners making decisions in the grocery store several other areas were created in pixelated for Offering a challenge to prioritize needs and wants and here you can see the carnival the snack vendor and a nail salon Of course got to take care of the nails Here's the credit union and this is where logger learners log their transactions in a tool provided free by brightbank.com It simulates a checking saving and credit card account providing practice with record keeping and money mindfulness This is an example of an important habit, which may not be modeled at home or taught elsewhere So without developing such habits youth in particular may not achieve a level of control and purpose with money That can lead them to that financial independence that I had mentioned earlier The learning experience concluded with a debrief and social sharing in the chat box where learners gave feedback on an Interactive message board and discuss their experiences So we'll get into some of the data that was generated from the the pilot study So using pre and post surveys. I evaluated the effectiveness of the lesson Analyze learner responses to the tasks and environment and Assessed feasibility of the virtual space for a synchronous blended learning experience Feedback from the participant serve per perspective was essential for developing the best understanding of how learners may respond to the lesson and the virtual space This will help inform future development and improvement of the island and the survey results demonstrate the initial proof of concept Which was the intent of the study and serve to build support for future adoption One of the few demographic points collected was generation and this was used as a way to capture and categorize age In some ways generation was not a differentiating factor For example with island ease of use and navigation and other areas trends were developing as you can see in the graph It shows how each generation responded to key elements of the constructivist or situated learning approach For example, you can see that boomers were drawn to areas that generation Z was not so like the transaction tracker and realism Fewer millennials Mentioned interactive learning than did generation Z and generation X And boomers were the only ones who commented about working with a partner which I thought was kind of interesting Gen X and boomers were drawn to flying all together but younger generations comments were really focused in other areas So these are just a few of the things that we pulled out of this open-ended data And this is exemplary of what the adults responded to But the lesson was intended for youth, though the generational data is intriguing And it suggests that there's more that can be studied about how adults would respond to learning financial concepts this way too This table is a categorical representation of what the pilot users liked most about the experience Each qualitative comment was sorted into these four categories and then aggregated by generation For example, if a person responded that they liked flying, it was counted as a comment related to game-based theory And also virtual world design If a person said that they liked to explore and make their own decisions, it was categorized as game-based theory and constructivist theory The percentage of comments from each generation is shown as they correspond to historical research, educational theory, content, and the instructional design related to this study For example, 50% of the comments on what Testard enjoyed about game-based theory were from Generation X Responses related to constructivist theory were fairly distributed across generations, whereas Gen X and Gen Y are the millennials In this study seemed to relate more toward the virtual world design than did the boomers in Gen Z It's also noteworthy that the boomers had more comments about financial education and it's important Which could be attributed to more life experience and what I saw as an emerging theme of the I wish I had been taught this when I was younger Or that youth need to know how to handle their money types of comments Which I hear quite a bit from adult learners This slide, this graph is really exemplary of what I consider to be the most significant objective And that is whether or not change in an individual's confidence occurs or can be captured And on this graph you can see, maybe or maybe not, I apologize that it might be a little bit muddy But the categories are stay within a budget so working from left to right Make positive financial decisions, spend less than I earn, keep accurate spending records, manage money to satisfy needs The second to the last bars shows save money for once and the last one is save money for emergencies So increases in the blue in the bottom chart show improved confidence in that area And you can see how there's a consistent decrease in those who felt only somewhat or not at all confident Which is shown, you can see those layers in the top chart in orange and green And those kind of disappear in the post pilot surveys So I was pretty happy about that And this contributes to the increases in confidence represented by the blue and red markers in the bottom chart So just kind of clarifying that This data supports the constructivist theory of learners as knowledge producers And with these results we can begin to correlate increased confidence and building self-efficacy to the learning experience itself So just to wrap up a couple of ideas, I was able to conduct a live study of a learning environment based on these principles and learning theories Significant successes of the study were the evidence of the behavior change and the positive responses to the island design Future state of the island Include the vision rather is for a full game version where interactions like quizzes, chat, chat bot, mapping, social media, anything that any developers out there might want to pop into the gameplay here But it was the idea of an experience where you're driving toward a result of graduating with those positive money habits and exhibited behaviors throughout the game Again, I don't have any funding, but any developers are welcome to chat with me So that's everything that I wanted to talk about. I do thank you for your interest I'm happy to take questions. I do think we have a couple of minutes here And after the discussion I will go to booth 17 if anyone wants to chat further or we can just remain here because I think we're at the end but I'll lead that up to our moderators And which expo was that on on booth 17? Oh, I think three. Does that make sense? Yeah, I hope so What it was again, 17? Yes, sir Okay, thank you Interesting stuff. I mean, I never realized that there'd be that much of a difference between the X and the Y and the Millennials That's very interesting How big was your group that you used to study that with and what did you use to decide where to base it off of? So it was a convenient sample of 17 people. So it was colleagues, coworkers, friends, and as it happened to turn out it was I have a pretty interesting range of people. We had educators, just others that I work with at SFQ Trying to think just others that are in just kind of the none of those arenas right so not financial education not education So it was really great and I had the fortunate circumstance to be connected to a software training company Who lent it lent the lab for me so I was that made it really great because I had a nice environment where people I didn't have to worry about the And it was really wonderful All right, do we have any questions from the audience at this point? Looks like a serene huntress has one How long are the expo regions going to be open if we can't get everywhere tonight? Yeah, we keep them up all year long so you'll have the next 12 months So Great So any other questions from our audience or anything else you wanted to add Cheryl? The slides are I've if I in the booth I did put a link to the slides, but I can put a link here to Well, they'll kind of be there soon Just finishing up a portfolio site for my studies. So that that'll take you to Some of the information and hopefully I'll put that up there soon And what would you like to do with this next move moving forward? I know that probably some of this was for the course that you were taking But what what are your aspirations or vision in the future? I really would like to create something that I can actually use in my professional work You know, we're it gets a little bit complicated in terms of risk potential risk assessment So meaning, you know from a any organization really would take that stance. I think but particularly as a financial institution You know, we've got a little bit. I think different perspective on on risk in terms of online and bringing people in I really would love so the yesterday there was some conversations the conference about, you know, mobile solutions and and more Closed environments and I think for something like this, especially for working with youth. It's it's that layer of protection That's very helpful. There are tools out there, but what I find is there's in the design There's a lot of Social bias just worked into the images that are used the language It's put in there and a lot of assumptions that are behind the the content. So, you know, we're we're pretty I Don't know for lack of a better word I'm just gonna say we're pretty picky about that and in our work and if it's a good value to have Because again, we're not looking to alienate anybody, you know, so we're looking to help people make them feel safe Okay, well appreciate that and yeah, a lot of times if you word the questions a certain way You can kind of draw out the responses So it's nice to see that you have that consideration up front to make sure that what you're getting back is Accurate information instead of just something that was set up Right, right. Thank you All right. Well, thank you very very much Cheryl for a terrific presentation