Fostering financial literacy in high school education through a gamethe experience of RANOKA

Abstract

According to the official educational curricula, formal financial training in Spain has been and still is limited. Consequently, the level of financial competences of Spanish students in their last year of high school remains below the average level of OECD’s countries. This research aims to highlight the importance of complementing the formal high school education with non-formal activities. Such non-formal activities could help in the acquisition of economicfinancial knowledge and skills at an early age. Specifically, an activity based on a game denominated “Ranoka” was designed and implemented to contribute to enhancing the financial literacy levels of young people. Therefore, our challenge is to increase the level of financial competence in a fun way to capture the attention of these young students when faced with content that might be tedious or unattractive for them. The activity was carried out in 2021 in the Southwest of Andalusia. Five different educational institutions and a total of 224 students from the last course of mandatory high school in Spain participated in the activity. The participants valued positively the proposed activity with an average score of 8.4 points out of 10. The students who participated in the game also answered a questionnaire. Five questions from the PISA report were used to test their level of financial competence. Results have been analysed by gender, type of school, and enrolment in Finance or Economics subjects. Therefore, the insights of this research could be useful for education authorities when developing the educational curricula of high school students.