Learning List recently reviewed Ramsey Education’s Foundations in Personal Finance: High School Edition, which was submitted for state adoption in Texas in response to the Texas Education Agency’s Proclamation 2019 call for high school Personal Financial Literacy products aligned to the new PFL Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Foundations in Personal Finance: High School Edition is a comprehensive resource to support instruction in Texas high school PFL courses. Content is available in print and online formats. The program integrates videos featuring financial experts with text-based content. Instruction addresses avoiding debt, budgeting effectively, investing, and giving.
Foundations in Personal Finance includes a direct instruction videos in which a financial expert explains some aspect of personal finance (e.g., “Basic Rules of Investing”). Most videos are developed specifically for the course, and some feature the authors speaking to an audience of students about the importance of money management. Print-based resources roughly correspond to Ramsey Education’s Foundations in Personal Finance online course (i.e., the two versions are not identical), and both versions incorporate videos. The print version includes a student workbook that accompanies the videos. The workbook cues students when to watch the video and includes pages with fill-in-the blank sentences that students complete while they watch. After the video, students respond to content in prompts for short journal entries (e.g., “If you were giving advice to a friend, what would you say are the most important things to know about investing?”).