Financial education in schools: A meta-analysis of experimental studies

37 experiments (per the published Economics of Education Review version) covering school-based financial education programmes

School students, primary through secondary, across high-income and developing economies.

The school-restricted companion to Kaiser et al. (2022) and the most directly relevant aggregate for a school builder, which is why it is retained despite overlapping authorship with the larger meta. Restricted to experimental and quasi-experimental studies of financial education delivered in schools. Meta-regressions report increasing returns to intensity and to smaller class size, with decreasing marginal returns. Recorded at abstract depth: the effect sizes below come from the published abstract and the authors' summaries, not from reading the tables, so the moderator structure and the handling of publication bias have not been checked here. That is debt, and it matters because the headline knowledge/behaviour ratio (5:1) is the single number this topic turns on.

School-based financial education has a sizeable average effect on financial KNOWLEDGE (+0.25 SD, comparable to educational interventions in other domains) and a small but significant effect on financial BEHAVIOUR (+0.05 SD). The five-to-one ratio between the two is the finding: schools can reliably teach the content and only marginally move conduct. Meta-regression finds larger effects for more intensive treatments and smaller classes, with decreasing marginal returns to intensity.

Low for the experimental core. School programmes are typically assigned at class or school level rather than chosen by families, so selection on heritable parental traits is limited.

Consistent with the same team's larger all-ages meta (Kaiser et al. 2022), which finds 0.204 SD on knowledge and 0.100 SD on behaviour across all ages — the school-restricted estimate has a larger knowledge effect and a smaller behaviour effect, which is what the age moderator in the larger meta also shows. No independent team has re-run the school-restricted synthesis.