Essential question: How can a person make financial decisions that reflect long-term goals rather than pressure, habit, or cognitive bias?
Instructional caution: Distinguish factual definitions, legal holdings, economic relationships, value judgments, and policy preferences. Do not grade students for political viewpoint; grade evidence, accuracy, reasoning, citation, and disciplinary method.
Analyze three purchase or investment scenarios and identify the bias, likely harm, and a practical guardrail.
Create a goal ladder with emergency, one-year, five-year, and long-term targets.
Instructional aim: Define the Week 1 problem, establish the relevant institutions or economic relationships, and construct an initial answer to the essential question.
Evidence of learning: Identify one distinction that prevents a common oversimplification of this topic.
Support: Provide a vocabulary preview, chunked text, text-to-speech, and claim/evidence sentence frames.
Extension: Identify a competing theoretical interpretation and describe what evidence could distinguish it.
Instructional aim: Evaluate a primary record, legal case, policy document, contract, or institutional source for authority, evidence, context, and limitation.
Evidence of learning: State one claim the focal record supports and one claim it cannot establish alone.
Support: Define specialized language, provide a structured annotation guide, and allow oral rehearsal before writing.
Extension: Locate a source from a different institutional or social position and explain how it confirms, complicates, or contradicts the first.
Instructional aim: Interpret a quantitative model, institutional process, financial calculation, or policy tradeoff without confusing description and causation.
Evidence of learning: Explain which conclusion remains valid after the changed assumption and which conclusion does not.
Support: Provide labeled examples, formulas or process steps, and a partially completed model.
Extension: Perform a sensitivity analysis or compare an alternative policy/institutional design.
Instructional aim: Construct and defend a precise claim using disciplinary evidence, a counterclaim, and a proportionate conclusion.
Evidence of learning: Explain why the counterclaim deserves a response rather than dismissal.
Support: Use claim-evidence-reasoning frames and permit an audio or oral draft before the final written product.
Extension: Rewrite the recommendation for an audience with a different role, jurisdiction, time horizon, or risk tolerance.
Instructional aim: Demonstrate weekly mastery, correct misconceptions, and transfer the central concept to a new case.
Evidence of learning: Apply the week’s reasoning to this mastery action: A student delays a high-pressure decision, compares total cost and alternatives, and documents the value and goal being served.
Support: Allow extended time, reduced-distraction setting, read-aloud where appropriate, and repeated attempts after documented correction.
Extension: Write one high-quality examination question and an answer key explaining why each distractor is wrong.
Each principal assignment is worth 30 points: 8 accuracy, 8 evidence or calculation, 6 reasoning, 4 counterargument/limitation, and 4 clarity/citation. Use the course rubrics for expanded descriptors.
| # | Question | Answer | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which definition best matches “financial goal”? | D | Financial goal means a specific, measurable, time-bound outcome involving money or resources. |
| 2 | Which definition best matches “tradeoff”? | C | Tradeoff means a sacrifice of one benefit in order to obtain another. |
| 3 | Which definition best matches “present bias”? | D | Present bias means the tendency to overweight immediate rewards relative to future consequences. |
| 4 | Which definition best matches “loss aversion”? | D | Loss aversion means the tendency to experience losses as more significant than equivalent gains. |
| 5 | Which definition best matches “anchoring”? | A | Anchoring means overreliance on an initial number or piece of information. |
| 6 | Which definition best matches “confirmation bias”? | A | Confirmation bias means preference for information that supports an existing belief. |
| 7 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 1? | B | Financial decisions combine values, constraints, information, uncertainty, and behavior. |
| 8 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 1? | B | Goals become actionable when they include amount, deadline, priority, and progress measure. |
| 9 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 1? | D | Bias can be reduced through comparison rules, waiting periods, automation, and independent verification. |
| 10 | Which action best demonstrates mastery of the Week 1 inquiry? | B | A student delays a high-pressure decision, compares total cost and alternatives, and documents the value and goal being served. |
When is a financially imperfect choice still reasonable because it protects an important personal value?
5 points: clear claim, accurate disciplinary reasoning, two specific pieces of evidence, meaningful qualification or counterargument, and complete explanation.