A measure built because the field did not have one.
Financial education has been taught to children for decades and measured almost entirely by what they can recall on a test. What they do with money, the decisions themselves, went unmeasured. The FLIQ Score™ was built to change that: to read financial decision-making from the choices a child makes in structured scenarios, before and after instruction, and over time.
Designed inside WealthWise Kids, a K–12 financial-literacy platform, as the measurement layer beneath every program. The first instrument, The $100 Week™, is a five-day browser simulation that captures every decision and stated reason as data.
The FLIQ Score™ methodology and marks are owned by WealthWise Kids IP Holdings LLC and operated by WealthWise Kids LLC under license. The scoring method is the FLIQ Score Model (FSM): its structure is public; its parameters are held under agreement. Research access runs through written data-use agreements.
An emerging measure, stated as one. Validation is under way with the research community rather than claimed in advance; the current status is on the Validation page and in the FLIQ Validation Brief.
Michael Olaiya
Developer of the FLIQ Score™ and the FLIQ Score Model (FSM) · Founder, WealthWise Kids
Michael Olaiya is an Atlanta entrepreneur and the founder of WealthWise Kids. He came to this work early. Raised in Section 8 housing in Washington, D.C., he was fed, tutored, and at times clothed by Martha’s Table, the nonprofit that put him on payroll in the sixth grade; by his teens he was teaching and mentoring dozens of children there while still enrolled in the program himself.
His research training came next. As a fellow in the Centers of Excellence Research and Scholars Program at Xavier University of Louisiana, and in research conducted at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, Maryland, where he worked cross-functionally with interdisciplinary scientists, he learned the disciplines that govern how evidence is made: study and trial design, protocol and endpoint definition, data integrity, systematic review and meta-analysis, and the plain rule that a finding is only as good as the method that produced it.
The FLIQ Score™ is where those two histories meet. The first taught him that children take money seriously when the stakes feel real, and that what they do with it tells you more than what they can recite. The second taught him how to measure that honestly: specify the construct, observe the behavior, disclose the limits, and let the evidence decide. He co-founded a public charter school in Atlanta and served on its board, and he leads the FLIQ research program’s partnerships with universities and evaluators. The curriculum and the pre- and post-assessment model behind the FLIQ Score™ were first developed for nonprofit use through The Carter & Olay Foundation, the 501(c)(3) he founded to bring financial-literacy programs to under-resourced communities at no cost, where Dr. David Garrison, a physicist and associate dean, led the assessment modeling and validation design. That work now informs how the instrument is specified and studied.
