Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training welcomes submissions to the new thematic series on Assessing Financial Literacy as a Basis for Designing and Evaluating Interventions in Vocational and Adult Education and Training.
Financial literacy—the ability to deal with money and financial matters reasonably—is becoming more essential in everyday life. Its increasing importance is mainly driven by socioeconomic trends, such as structural changes in the financial and labour markets and the decline of the welfare state, and by demographic changes. These trends impose challenges on citizens that cannot be tackled by family socialisation and everyday experience alone. In contrast, they demand education or training intervention, such as instruction, counselling/coaching and information provision via the media. In particular, this request is pressing for the following target groups:
- Those starting their professional lives, particularly apprentices in vocational education and training and university students.
- Those in charge of managing and planning their own and their families’ financial affairs in different situations of their adult lives (e.g. purchasing real estate, retirement planning), including those who are confronted with specific financial risks (e.g. overcoming precarious living conditions, such as unemployment or divorce).
To design effective interventions for those groups, the first step is assessing their current state of financial literacy. Moreover, a sound assessment approach is an indispensable prerequisite for evaluating the success and impact of those interventions.
Thus, this thematic issue is focused on different approaches of assessing financial literacy. To date, many financial literacy assessments for the target groups of interest mainly include multiple-choice items, and they often only measure isolated bits of knowledge. However, as known from research on inert knowledge, this type of assessment does not necessarily represent the ability to use this knowledge in everyday problem solving and decision-making. In addition, non-cognitive facets of financial literacy, such as delay of gratification and risk preference, are not always considered, or they are only measured by self-reporting, which poses the risk of social desirability biases.
To measure financial literacy reliably and validly and to capture the educational needs as accurately and comprehensively as possible, contributions that address financial literacy assessment from various perspectives are particularly welcome. For example, this could mean considering different facets of the construct (e.g. cognitive, non-cognitive, individual and systemic aspects) or using different assessment methods, including questionnaires, situational judgement tests or serious games.
Submission instructions
Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have carefully read the submission guidelines for Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training. The complete manuscript should be submitted through the journal submission system. To ensure that you submit to the correct thematic series please select the appropriate section in the drop-down menu upon submission. In addition, indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the Thematic Series on series title. All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review, and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection.
Deadline for submission
This Call for Papers is open from now until 31 January 2018. Submitted papers will be reviewed in a timely manner and published directly after acceptance (i.e. without waiting for the accomplishment of all other contributions). Thanks to the Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training (ERVET) open access policy, the articles published in this thematic issue will have a wide, global audience.
Lead Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Carmela Aprea, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
carmela.aprea@uni-jena.de
Guest Editors
Prof. Dr. Eveline Wuttke, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
wuttke@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Prof. Dr. Bärbel Fürstenau, TU Dresden, Germany
baerbel.fuerstenau@tu-dresden.de