Week 9: Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

This week was all about pulling the pieces together.

I’ve been deep in writing the final report. The introduction and methodology sections are done, and I’m now in the middle of analyzing the pre-test results. Some of the trends are what I expected, but they’re giving me insight into where people are struggling. It’s also providing me insight on how flawed financial literacy tests can be – they cover surface level knowledge questions rather than question application skill. I was able to see some of this when I added free response questions to my pre-test – something many studies don’t do.

I’ll be administering the post-test this weekend. I designed it to match the difficulty of the pre-test pretty closely, so I can properly compare people’s financial literacy knowledge before and after using the bot.

At the end of the post-test, I added a few extra questions about the user experience:

• “Would you use a tool like this to learn something else in the future?”
• “Has this made you more likely to take steps toward becoming financially literate?”

The goal here is to figure out not just whether they learned something, but if it was able to inspire them to spend more time towards being financially literate. If the bot helped shift their mindset even a little, that’s a win.

On the platform side, I’ve also been working on the file upload feature. The idea is to let users upload PDFs on any subject they want to learn (history, bio, econ, physics) and have the bot generate personalized lessons from them. It’s still in progress, but once it’s up and running, it turns the platform into something way more flexible than just a financial literacy tutor. It becomes a starting point for learning anything.

One more week to go. It’s the last leg, and it’s all starting to come together.