Moving Cooperative Extension’s Financial Education and Evaluation Strategies Forward! A Call for Action

The causal relationship between financial education, financial literacy, and financial outcomes has yet to be consistently and effectively demonstrated due to a lack of organized efforts around program design, delivery, and evaluation (Courchane & Zorn, 2005; Fernandes et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2014; Willis, 2009). The Battelle Report and national leaders are suggesting that Extension needs a national strategy to demonstrate program impact across the system.

This webinar will provide an overview of Extension's previous and current efforts to evaluate programs system-wide. Your participation will help identify program content and current evaluation practices to establish a baseline that helps develop a standardized, aggregated reporting process for evaluating financial education programs. We will brainstorm strategies for Cooperative Extension to collectively contribute to advancing evaluation practices and documenting evidence of program impact. The webinar will lay the groundwork for future collaborative efforts among members of the Extension community and determine next steps to help create and support a national effort to a) identify and pool resources to support these efforts, b) coordinate program impact collection, c) contribute to financial literacy education scholarship, and d) build FRM program evaluation capacity of our colleagues.

Presenters:

Suzanne Bartholomae, Adjunct Associate Professor and Extension State Specialist, Iowa State University

Maria Pippidis, Extension Educator and New Castle County Extension Director, University of Delaware Cooperative Extension

Moderator:

Elizabeth Kiss, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist, Kansas State University

https://youtu.be/U4fCkOjII4s