Research Update

Inside EmpowerED: Listening Before Building

Before writing a single lesson for our microcredentials learning platform, EmpowerED wanted to understand the specific needs of the people we are designing for. Over the past months, that meant sitting down to discuss numeracy and financial literacy with adult learners, students, and teachers across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Romania. The goal was not to test anyone, but to hear how numeracy and money show up in the daily lives of our target audience, and to identify where the real friction points are.

Grounded in what's already known

The conversations didn't start from scratch. We built on two established frameworks, the Common European Numeracy Framework and the EU Financial Competence Framework for Adults, which shaped the direction of our interview sessions. These frameworks define numeracy as the ability to cope confidently with the mathematical demands of adult life, and financial competence as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to make sound money decisions. Together they gave us a shared vocabulary and ensured the sessions covered everyday number scenarios, financial decision making, and the confidence level people bring to both.

A conversation, not an exam

Interviews happened in small groups of three to five, led mostly by teachers the participants already knew and trusted. This familiarity matters. Each session opened with a light, non-competitive puzzle game to break the ice and ease nerves before any of the sensitive topics came up. From there, the talk moved gently through four areas: numeracy in daily life, how people think about words like math and arithmetic, financial choices like saving and banking, and the kinds of learning materials they would enjoy using to explore these topics further.

Keeping the groups small was a carefully planned choice. The aim was to give everyone room to speak, and people tended to build on each other's answers rather than shut down. What might feel intimidating one-on-one became far more relaxed as a shared conversation.

What we're hearing so far

A few things stood out early in the process. Anxiety around mathematics is real. To ease it, we had to be very clear about the intention of the interviews: a conversation, with no assessments and no judgment. Many participants showed strong, practical numeracy by managing household budgets, tracking grocery costs, monitoring rent, and helping their children with homework, even when formal mathematical language felt foreign. Often the bigger barrier wasn't the numbers at all, but the administrative language wrapped around them. Visual aids and everyday examples kept things moving, while abstract ideas like financial risk were harder to engage with unless tied to something concrete. There was also a clear appetite for digital, real-world learning over paper based materials.

What are our next steps?

Every interview is being transcribed and analyzed for patterns across groups, topics, and countries. Those patterns feed into a needs analysis report, followed by a gap analysis that pinpoints the distance between best practices for numeracy and financial education and what our target groups need for day-to-day life. That gap analysis is the bridge to what comes next, the learning materials and microcredentials platform that EmpowerED will design and build in the months ahead, shaped directly by the voices in our interview rooms.