Finance Education

Abstract

The author proposes that finance educators should adopt an experiential approach to finance education in order to enhance finance graduates' interpersonal, problem-solving and critical thinking skills. The application of Kolb's experiential learning cycle to the finance discipline reveals the need for educators to consider different learning styles when designing papers. In order to incorporate multiple learning styles into the learning experience, a learning matrix is developed to match learning activities explicitly to a specified range of educational objectives for each major teaching concept. The experiential approach and the use of learning matrices are discussed in the context of a graduate-level open-learning finance paper at Massey University, New Zealand. The model is sufficiently generic to be used in a variety of disciplines, and offers educators a methodology for the design of experiential papers through which students can experience a wide range of learning skills and enhance their education.