FINANCIAL LEARNING AND DISPOSITIONAL FACTORS IN PREDICTING FINANCIAL LITERACY PERFORMANCE

The objective of the present study was to analyze the influence of financial learning at school and in the family and of dispositional factors on financial literacy performance among Brazilian students. The research adopted a quantitative approach, with a retrospective cross-sectional and descriptive design, grounded in the theoretical-deductive method. The sample included 8.311 15-year-old students who participated in PISA 2018, whose secondary data were extracted from the public database provided by the OECD. In this assessment, financial literacy performance was measured through a cognitive test, while information on financial learning and dispositional factors was obtained from contextual questionnaires administered to the students. The data analysis procedure involved Pearson correlations and descriptive statistics, followed by OLS and quantile regressions, which were used to estimate the effect of the explanatory variables on financial literacy performance.The results showed that financial education in school classes was negatively and significantly associated with financial literacy performance, whereas familiarity with financial concepts was positively and significantly related. Parental involvement contributed only to improving the performance of students with lower proficiency. Dispositional factors — competitiveness, self-efficacy regarding global issues, and metacognition — showed positive and significant associations with financial literacy, except for students’ work motivation and mastery achievement motivation at the 0.75 and 0.95 quantiles. It is concluded that dispositional characteristics are the main positive predictors of financial literacy performance among Brazilian students in PISA 2018.