Empowering Future Citizens in Making Financial Decisions: A Study of Elementary School Mathematics Textbooks from Romania

Abstract

Since the major financial crisis in 2008, Financial Education is getting an international recognition in Education. In Romania, the challenge to financially educate students is particularly important because the country is still adapting to a capitalist economy and most adults grew up under a communist economy. The elementary school national curriculum includes Financial Education embedded into the Mathematics Curriculum. In this book chapter, we present a qualitative study on the Mathematics textbooks approved by the Romanian Ministry of Education and used during the school year 2018–2019. We investigated the learning situations (tasks) proposed in the textbooks whose content had a connection to financial education. Three themes emerged from our analysis: no potential decision, potential decision and decision. In the third theme, decision, we sub-divided it into five categories: four of them related to simple decisions, and one related to complex decisions. Our results show that the tasks having a potential decision and those having a simple decision reflect practices of representational measurement. On the other hand, the complex decisions category, despite being rarer, reflects practices of pragmatic measurement. The tasks under this category are not only richer in regard to the making-decision opportunity, but also in regard to financial education.