#4 4MAT System and Learning Context
How is McCarthy’s 4MAT System informing your thinking about framing learning contexts?
A little recap: the 4MAT System
The four quadrants represent different stages of an ideal learning process, which can also form a cycle. We also realized that nowadays most of the learning experiences, including financial literacy education, focus on teaching the information but fall short of eliciting motivation. Therefore, in our future exploration, we will focus more on the why, how and what if to cultivate a more meaningful learning experience.
Framing our project by 4MAT system
Here is our diagram on Miro board:
1st quadrant: Why is it important?
Learner’s hat: We discovered both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for learners to learn. For intrinsic ones, we found most of them were related to preparing for better future life by gaining more financial knowledge or building financial stability. While for the extrinsic ones, most of them were the avoidance of undesirable situations such as anxiety around money or unnecessary debt.
Designer’s hat: Among the ideas we generated to motivate learners to learn, we started to identify some patterns. One is to provide personas/testimonials for students to gain motivation, and the persona/testimonials can either be positive or negative. For example, we could let the students watch how the life paths of two people (who originally grew up together) diverged based on their different financial statuses. The other is to provide some sort of interactive activities for students such as life simulation or games to help them realize the importance of finance.
2nd quadrant: What information to learn?
Learner’s hat: We did this part based on the research we did before about different aspects of financial literacy: budgeting, investing, saving, credit, tax, etc. We believed that it was important for students to learn about all these, even just dipping their toes into these topics.
Designer’s hat: In terms of how to communicate the key information, we came up with a lot of creative ideas: game, puppet show, simulation, cartoons, etc. We also came up with some down-to-earth ideas such as mentorship, Q&A events, onboarding courses, etc. To decide the types of communication styles, we might need to survey our stakeholders about their desired learning methods or habits. We might even need to design different ways of learning for different types of learners.
3rd quadrant: What would learners need to practice?
Learner’s hat: It was a bit hard for us to come up with sticky notes in this section since it was similar to the second quadrant. We wrote these based on our understanding of those financial topics. However, we would need to dive into the specificity a bit more in the future.
Designer’s hat: It was exciting to come up with ideas in this quadrant since what most current financial education lack was doing. We found simulation, game and mentorship ideas appeared here again. Apart from these, we also thought about collaboration with financial providers and building tools into existing school platforms.
4th quadrant: What might encourage learners to think about broader applications?
Learner’s hat: As a learner, one thing they might think about most after gaining the basic level of financial literacy was keep learning and practicing to strengthen their skills and financial stability. Apart from that, upgrading expenditure (such as buying a new house) might also be a big motivation.
Designer’s hat: In this quadrant, an idea that stood out to us most is mentorship or swapping teaching roles. The learned who was mentored/taught before by others could now become a mentor/teacher others.
Insights from the activity
After doing this activity, we found several design ideas that appeared a lot in multiple quadrants: simulation, mentorship, game, and allocation of funds. In future exploration, we may go off from these ideas since they have the potential to address multiple stages of learning process.
Simulation
Note: Yellow color represents the quadrant that this idea mainly focuses on
Mentorship
Game
Allocation of funds
Conclusion and next step
Last time when we did the activity of bridging the gap, we started to think about some interventions. The learning cycle activity in this class really got us to think deeper and broader about those interventions by putting them into the context of learning. Therefore, we were able to come up with ideas that are more granular and interesting. However, those ideas are still very broad and vague, so in the next step we might need to keep exploring them to add more specificity.
