Jayne Ann Harder, Oral Roberts University
Kristi Karber, University of Central Oklahoma
Heather Lester, Connors State College
Deborah Moore-Russo, University of Oklahoma
Paul Regier, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
This CoRD provides a peer-reviewed set of activities and assessments designed to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of essential aspects of financial mathematics, including budgeting, interest, savings, and taxes. These topics hold significance beyond a student’s academic journey, as they play a crucial role in their personal, and possibly professional, success. Many of the activities intentionally involve collaborative learning activities to encourage communication. Active student engagement is promoted through meaningful applications relevant to student experience. For example, compound interest, annuity, and loan applications develop deeper students’ conceptual understanding of proportions and percentages. The activities are provided below via hyperlinks (denoted by blue, underlined text). Each activity is provided in a lesson plan format consistent across the activities.
Instructor’s Guide
Personal Budgeting and Consuming Behavior
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Cost of Major Life Events
Handout
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In this open-ended activity, students read and interpret quantitative information made available through tables and graphs that accompany the text to learn about how much major life events such as going to college, paying for a wedding, buying a home, and raising a child cost. |
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Budgeting for Home Ownership
Handout [Solution]
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In this activity, students compare various types of mortgages and approaches to mortgage repayment to identify an optimal strategy for buying a house. They also create a budget for a fictitious family of four that includes a plan for purchasing a home. |
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Credit Cards
Handout
Spreadsheet
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In this activity, students analyze what happens when credit card debt goes unchecked. Using spreadsheets, students model unchecked credit card debt as an introduction to compounding interest. Then students modify these calculations to model regular monthly payments against credit-bearing debt as a context for understanding how loans work. |
Loans
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Home Loans
In-Class Practice [Solutions]
Out-of-Class Activity
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In this activity, students create an Excel spreadsheet to compute the monthly payment for a home loan. A “how-to” video is provided to help students who are new to spreadsheets. |
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Car Loans
Handout [Solutions]
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In this activity, which is a higher-level application of loans and annuities, students compare the impact of buying a car by paying outright or taking a loan and investing the money they have. |
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Refinancing
Activity [Solutions]
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This activity is a higher-level application of loans that utilizes a sequence of tasks to analyze whether to refinance a house mortgage after paying for 10 years on an original mortgage. The result shows students that even if you lower a monthly payment on a mortgage and have a lower interest rate, you might still pay far more for a new mortgage. |
Saving Money and Investing
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Savings
Activity
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In this open-ended activity, which includes reading an article on ways to save money, students explore their expected future salaries and compute how much they should save via the 50/30/20 Savings Plan. They also compute the future value of an IRA either by hand or by using an Excel spreadsheet. |
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Stock Market Analysis
Worksheet [Key]
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In this activity, students are introduced to candlestick charts, which are commonly used in the stock market to denote trends for a stock. |
Taxes
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Salary Taxes
Notes [Key]
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In this activity, students learn about social security and medicare payroll taxes. |
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Sales Tax
Worksheet [Key]
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In this activity, students learn about and look up the current sales tax rates to see how sales tax percentage rates vary across different states as well as across just a single state. |
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Personal Income Tax
Worksheet
Cards [Key]
Homework [Key]
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In this activity, students learn the difference between gross and net income as well as the difference between state and federal taxes. The activity involves a scavenger hunt game for students to practice reading a paycheck, identifying gross and net pay, and computing various tax amounts. |
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
