Evidence

Built to measure. First cohort, fall 2026.

The Launchpad was designed so that every class produces learning data a curriculum office or a researcher can read: what students knew before, what they knew after, how confident they felt, what they did, and how they compare with adults nationally. This page states the instrument, the benchmark, and the limits.

What we measure

Knowledge, before and after

Every module opens with a short quiz and closes with another. The two ask different questions about the same concept, so a gain reflects the concept rather than a remembered answer. The dashboard reports each question's pre and post share correct and the class gain in points.

Confidence, before and after

Students rate their confidence on a five-point scale at the start and end of each module. Paired with the quiz, this shows where a class was overconfident and where a module closed the gap between what students felt they knew and what they could do.

Behavior, not just knowledge

Each student keeps a Flight Plan: real money moves they choose for themselves, marked to-do, planned, or done with a date. It is the student's own record of what they did, outside the course, because they took it.

The Big Three, on the first day and the last

Three questions on compound interest, inflation, and risk diversification, written by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell and asked verbatim, with "do not know" as an accepted answer. The same three items sit in the National Financial Capability Study and the P-Fin Index, which is what lets a class be compared with national results.

The national benchmark

Since the Big Three were first asked in the United States in 2004, the share of adults who answer all three correctly has stayed near a third. The figure we compare classes with:

30%
of U.S. adults, all three correct

30.2 percent of U.S. adults answered all three questions correctly in the 2009 National Financial Capability Study, as reported by Lusardi and Mitchell in the Journal of Economic Literature (2014, Table 2, n = 1,488). Their 2023 review reports about one-third of young adults answering all three correctly, 29 percent of women and 48 percent of men. Risk diversification is the question people miss most, and the one most often answered "do not know."

A teacher's class board shows the share of the class with all three correct on the first day, on the last day, and the national figure beside them, with n.

What we will report, and when

The Launchpad's first measured cohort runs in fall 2026 across two teachers' classrooms. When the semester ends we will publish here, for each module and for the course:

Figures will be de-identified aggregates. No student is ever named in anything we publish.

Prior pilot: The College Project

83.3%
from 46.7%

believed they could afford a 4-year public university

69%
from 17.6%

believed they could afford a 4-year private university

Prior pilot, The College Project, California classrooms: a pre-course survey of 368 students and a post-course survey of 99. The percentages compare the two surveys. These are belief and stress measures, not knowledge measures. The Launchpad's own pre/post assessment runs with its first cohort in fall 2026; write to us for either instrument.

Limitations

For researchers and districts

De-identified, aggregate results for a district's own classes are available to that district on request. Record-level data is shared with a researcher only under a written agreement with the district and applicable consent; the terms we hold data under are in the district data agreement. The survey instrument, including the exact quiz items, is available on request.

Ask for the instrument or the dataDistrict data agreement (PDF)See the class board in the demo

Sources