The FLIQ
Score™
The Financial Literacy Intelligence Quotient — a behavioral score that measures how a child actually decides about money. One measure runs beneath every WealthWise Kids experience, from the first lesson to a real-world choice.
No child is ever labeled by a number.
Students see a badge and how far they have moved. Never a rank, never a comparison to a classmate. The score is a measure of a program, not a verdict on a child.
Not a test.
It never asks “what's the right answer?” It watches the decisions a child makes in real, real-feeling scenarios.
A before & after.
One score before the program, one after. The distance between them is a real number you can report.
Eight dimensions.
One sub-score per competency domain — a behavioral profile, not a single grade.
The ladder
One index. Five stages.
The number districts act on isn’t the level — it’s the change. A cohort that moves 529 → 687 tells you what a semester bought, whether or not you’ve ever seen this scale before.
529 → 687+158
Developing (Builder) → Advancing (Thinker)
Example of how one class moves across a semester.
Move the slider
What each stage looks like in a child
Weighs the trade-off before deciding, not after. Sets a goal and adjusts when something changes.
A single reading is a starting point, not a verdict. The number a school acts on is the distance between two readings.
Leaders see the change, the score, and all eight areas. Students see only their badge.
The FLIQ equation
Four things make the number.
You don’t need the formula to trust the number. Here is what the equation is actually looking at.
01
What they did
Real decisions across eight areas of money — earning, spending, saving, giving, borrowing, investing, protecting and planning.
02
How much we saw
A child who made one good call is not scored like a child who made eight. Thin evidence counts for less, and never counts against them.
03
What they did for real
Verified things that happened outside the simulation. These count for more — within a cap, so nothing can be stockpiled.
04
One stage, one number
It resolves to a band a teacher can act on, and an index that shows movement between two readings.
Two students can reach the same score different ways, and the profile shows you which. A teacher doesn’t need to read the formula to use it — the report says what the child did, where they grew, and what to work on next.
For research and assessment leads — the full equation
The formula’s structure is published in full; the coefficients are not. Full methodology, current validity status and stated limitations are documented in the FLIQ Score™ Validation Brief.
Request the Validation Brief →
FLIQ=Φ(Σwi·Di·Ci+Σλj·Nj)
Gold terms are withheld. Everything else is exactly what it says.
Di
Domain behavior
How the child actually decided, in each of the eight domains.
Ci
Evidence confidence
Rises with observation. One lucky choice never counts like eight consistent ones.
wiWITHHELD
Domain weighting
How much each domain contributes to the composite.
Nj
Node signals
Verified real-world events, inside the ecosystem and beyond it.
λjWITHHELD
Node weighting
A real action carries more than a simulated one — and saturates, so it cannot be stockpiled.
ΦWITHHELD
Calibration
Maps the composite onto the 117–936 index.
Six layers, one number
01
Instruments
The $100 Week™ · CoinQuest™ · Financial Foundations™ · PlayLab™ · Real-World Pathways™ · Adventures™
02
TraitsWITHHELD
Four behavioral primitives observed in every decision.
03
Domains
Earning · Spending · Saving · Giving · Borrowing · Investing · Protecting · Planning
04
Confidence
Evidence density per domain. Thin evidence is trusted less, never treated as failure.
05
Nodes
Verified real-world behavior. The set is open — anything can become a node.
06
CalibrationWITHHELD
One index, one band.
→
Thinker — 687 FLIQ
It keeps counting after the lesson ends.
Practice happens in the simulation. Real life happens everywhere else, and the score can see both. A child who reasons about a company in class and is later gifted a real share of it has done two different things, and the second one counts differently. New sources can be added over time — another program, a partner, a district’s own system — without the score changing what it means.
Real-world credit is capped: the first step outside the simulation moves the number, the tenth barely does. No family can buy a child a better score. Partner sources are in development.
The Signal.
The moment a child’s choice becomes a number — and a number becomes a signal. A short film on the one signal running through everything.
Behavioral, not academic.
Knowing about money doesn't reliably change what people do with it. So the FLIQ Score™ measures the decisions a child makes inside simulations, scenarios, and reflection — then compares before to after.
Eight scores, one for each area of money, build into a picture of how a child decides — the kind of evidence a teacher, a board, or a funder can actually act on.
Eight dimensions of financial decision-making.
The FLIQ Score™ isn’t one number — it’s a behavioral profile across eight competency domains. A pre- and post-program reading shows not just that a child grew, but where.
Illustrative example, not pilot results · pre → post across the eight FCF™ domains.
Earning. How money is made, and what it costs to make it.
Spending. Judging what is worth it, and what isn't.
Saving. Holding back now for something later.
Giving. Deciding what to share, and why.
Borrowing. Understanding what is owed before agreeing to owe it.
Investing. Putting money to work, and weighing the risk.
Protecting. Guarding what you have against loss.
Planning. Sequencing choices toward a goal.
The answer to the only question that matters: did it work?
Every district administrator, grant officer, and school board asks it. Free programs can show engagement. The FLIQ Score™ is designed to show behavior change — a structured outcome measure a school can put in front of a board, a funder, or a family and say: here is what changed.
Everyone else stops at the worksheet. We measure what a child does when it’s real.
The Real-World Capstone™ is the moment a student takes what they practiced and does it for real — launches a small business, makes a first real investment, gives to a cause. The FLIQ Score™ captures that first real revealed behavior and measures the leap from practiced to real. It’s the one thing a quiz can never show — and the reason FLIQ is a credential that follows a child from simulation into the real world, not a test score that stops at the classroom door.
The real test is at home.
Anyone can measure a child in a classroom. iPARENTS™ is designed to extend the FLIQ Score™ to what happens at home — because a lesson that stays in the classroom was never really learned. In development.
What this looks like on a Tuesday.
You do not administer the FLIQ Score™. You run the lesson. The measurement happens underneath it.
No extra test
There is no separate assessment to schedule, proctor or grade. The score is built from choices students already make inside the activity.
No extra prep
Facilitators run the session as written. Setup is the same whether or not the measurement is switched on.
You see it first
Your class view shows movement across the eight domains before anyone upstream sees a report — so you are never surprised by your own data.
The FLIQ Score™ lives inside every WealthWise Kids program.
Measuring children carries obligations. Read how we handle student data, what we collect, and what we never do — our data commitments.