Essential question: How can a long-term investor pursue growth without confusing uncertainty, volatility, speculation, and fraud?
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.
Create three diversified model portfolios for short, medium, and long horizons and justify risk, liquidity, fees, and rebalancing.
Compare fund expense ratios and calculate their long-term effect under identical gross returns.
Instructional aim: Define the Week 14 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 matches risk to time horizon and capacity for loss, diversifies broadly, and verifies fees and registration before investing.
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 “stock”? | C | Stock means an ownership interest in a corporation. |
| 2 | Which definition best matches “bond”? | B | Bond means a debt instrument promising specified payments subject to issuer risk. |
| 3 | Which definition best matches “mutual fund”? | C | Mutual fund means a pooled investment vehicle issuing shares and holding a portfolio under a stated strategy. |
| 4 | Which definition best matches “exchange-traded fund”? | D | Exchange-traded fund means a pooled investment fund whose shares trade on an exchange. |
| 5 | Which definition best matches “diversification”? | A | Diversification means spreading exposure across investments to reduce asset-specific risk. |
| 6 | Which definition best matches “volatility”? | A | Volatility means the degree of variation in an asset’s price or return over time. |
| 7 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 14? | D | Expected return generally rises with risk, but risk never guarantees reward. |
| 8 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 14? | C | Diversification reduces asset-specific risk but does not eliminate broad market risk. |
| 9 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 14? | D | Investment suitability depends on goals, time horizon, liquidity, capacity for loss, taxes, and fees. |
| 10 | Which action best demonstrates mastery of the Week 14 inquiry? | B | A student matches risk to time horizon and capacity for loss, diversifies broadly, and verifies fees and registration before investing. |
Should a young investor always hold more risky assets simply because the time horizon is long?
5 points: clear claim, accurate disciplinary reasoning, two specific pieces of evidence, meaningful qualification or counterargument, and complete explanation.