Sketching a possible learning progression for the cognitive component of FE, in the broader context of economics education.

The teaching in schools of various topics related to the economy has been proposed for different purposes, and under different titles, such as economic education (e.g., National Council For Economic Education, 2010), consumer education (Benn, 2004), and, more recently, financial education (INFE 2012). Designing standards and curricula, and implementing intervention studies have mainly involved economists and educators, rather than educational researchers and cognitive and educational psychologists. Economic notions and competences have therefore remained on the fringe of theoretical debates and empirical research on the teaching and learning of disciplines, which have mainly addressed natural sciences and mathematics, and have elaborated notions such as naive theories, developmental sequence, learning progression. In this chapter, I illustrate these notions and show how economic concepts can be introduced into financial education. I present a summary of the literature on children's understanding of the economic world in the absence of formal instruction. Building on this literature and some intervention studies, I propose a learning progression of economic and financial concepts addressed to K-8, that is, a pathway for conducting students to ways of thinking or acting that gradually align with scientific versions, grounded on the results of developmental and instructional research.