The Effects of the Chair the Fed Simulation on High School Students’ Knowledge

Abstract

Chair the Fed is an award-winning online simulation developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to teach about the role of the Fed in achieving its dual mandate goals of stable prices and maximum employment. It is widely used, with an average of close to 85,000 games started each month in 2019. This article describes Chair the Fed and the results of a controlled experiment to determine its effects on learning in high school economics classes in the Fed’s 12th district. We find that students who played Chair the Fed score significantly higher on a 10-question posttest compared with students who learned about the Fed and monetary policy in more traditional ways. In evaluating our results, we compare difference-in-difference regression modeling with the traditional economic education model where the posttest score is regressed on the pretest score, and find that our results are robust across both specifications. JEL Classifications: A20, A21, E52, E58

Game-based learning as a gateway for promoting financial literacy – how games in economics influence students’ financial interest

“…In addition, GPA should be obtained as well as the subject grade for economics because these could act as potential confounding variables. For replication studies, we therefore recommend considering a valid survey of GPA by collecting school records (see, e.g., Duzhak et al, 2021; Lin, 2018).…”

“…However, the extent to which GBL can be used effectively to promote financial literacy has not been empirically tested. The few studies conducted to date in this domain confirm an advantage of GBL over traditional learning methods in terms of an increase in financial knowledge (Duzhak et al, 2021; Huang and Hsu, 2011; Wilson et al, 2020). This is also evident across domains, especially in mathematics and language learning (Wouters et al, 2013).…”

“…First, the influence of gender is controversial. For example, there is evidence that gender exerts no influence on play behavior in economics education (Dobrescu et al, 2015; Lin, 2018) but that gender can partially explain the variance in learning outcomes through GBL (Duzhak et al, 2021). Second, prior achievement, such as grade point average (GPA) (ibid.…”

Education or entertainment?

“…bank governors (Duzhak et al, 2020). These are common both within the Federal Reserve System (Chair the Fed) and (previously) the European Central Bank.…”