Audio: Obama's Financial Literacy Plans

A Plee for Financial Literacy

http://www.etherpopsicle.com/2009/02/telegram-to-barack-obama-investment.html

Luis of LA @ Feb 21, 2009 06:49:32 AM

Increasing Financial Literacy Across the Nation

Obama and Kimberly are right - Financial Literacy is so important. It's so reassuring to know that our new president is taking an active role in increasing financial education across the nation.

I've found that Credit Unions offer a free financial literacy program called FoolProof. It's a Web-based program designed to teach people of all ages about money, financial responsibility and the realities of the free enterprise system. This initiative is being funded by the participation of credit unions and is available to all consumers, whether or not they are members of a credit union. FoolProof covers virtually all national and state guidelines for core financial education. Check it out at foolproofme.com.

Jess McCaa of CO @ Jan 22, 2009 19:39:30 PM

A New Delivery System for Financial Literacy Education

It is widely acknowledged in the field of education that students rarely acquire a deep understanding of the material they are supposed to learn in their courses. Students normally settle for shallow knowledge, such as lists of concepts, a handful of facts about each concept, and simple definitions of key terms. Students lack the deep coherent understanding that fortifies the learner for generating inferences, solving problems, and applying their knowledge to practical situations.

Given this unfortunate state of affairs, many researchers and teachers in education, psychology, and computer science using Artificial Intelligence have been exploring learning environments and pedagogical strategies that promote deep comprehension.

A concept, known as Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) or Intelligent Computer-Aided Instruction (ICAI), has been pursued for more than three decades, resulting in prototypes and operational ITS systems providing computer-based instruction to support corporate training, K-12 and college education, and military training. This technology can be applied to financial literacy education.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are computer-based instructional tools that rely on Artificial Intelligence techniques to generate individualized and customized interactions tailored to a student's learning needs. The ITS customizes the instruction to match the level of understanding of the learner, and guides the learner to a higher level of comprehension by providing explanations, hints, examples, demonstrations, and practice problems as needed. Research on prototype systems indicates that ITS-taught students generally learn faster and translate the learning into improved performance better than classroom-trained participants.

Thus, instead of being an information delivery system that bombards the student with a large volume of information, ITS can engage the student in natural language conversation that attempts to get the student to do the talking and that explores what the student knows as students answer questions and solve problems that require deep reasoning. Virtual Tutors, as intelligent and animated pedagogical agents, have been developed that can guide the students to an understanding of the educational content. Continuing research is developing new and innovative improvements that further enhance the learning that can result from Virtual Tutors using ITS.

Prof. Samuel D. Bornstein of NJ @ Jan 21, 2009 17:24:04 PM