Written By: National Endowment for Financial Education

In August 2005, the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) hosted a groundbreaking event, brining educators from a variety of disciplines together to explore how to make financial literacy programs more effective. This was the first symposium ever to combine financial educators with leaders from other fields–neuroscience, change theory, behavioral economics, and psychology–with the common goal of finding new ways to help move people toward taking positive actions to create a healthier financial future. The symposium, titled “Closing the Gap Between Knowledge and Behavior: Turning Education into Action,” was organized around four featured presentations that examined topics as diverse as the implications of brain biology on behavior, effective programs that incorporate change theory, observed economic behavior versus traditional economic theory, and the psychology of an individual’s money personality. From this fertile cross-pollination of ideas, participants developed a list of exciting next steps: defining research and resource needs, prosing changes and new directinos for financial educators, and identifying relationships that need to be leveraged to build more effective financial literacy programs. A white paper report on this symposium follows. Key words: financial behavior, financial knowledge, financial literacy

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