Beyond Financial-Literacy Scores: Assessing Decision Quality in Early Stock-Market Education in India — A Targeted Critical Review

This targeted critical review examines the assessment of financial decision-making competence in early stock-market education, with particular attention to Indian adolescents. Indian student studies are considered alongside international intervention research and experiments on financial-choice errors. The sources measure several outcomes that should be kept separate, especially tested knowledge and the quality of financial decisions. School programmes improve financial knowledge on average. Their reported behavioural effects, however, do not establish how Indian pupils will invest later in life. Evidence from decision experiments also raises doubts about relying on conventional test scores alone. The review considers pre-decision records in fictional business-allocation exercises as one possible assessment supplement. This proposal has not been validated. Future studies would need to establish reliable scoring and examine how students respond to social influence. Longer follow-up is necessary to investigate whether classroom reasoning transfers to later financial choices. AI-use disclosure for the Zenodo record description:Use of generative AI: OpenAI ChatGPT was used extensively during October 2026 for literature discovery assistance, summarisation of accessible sources, organisation of the source audit and author-supplied interpretations, substantial manuscript drafting, language revision and document formatting. The sole human author contributed critical source appraisals, identified limitations and counterevidence, proposed the illustrative classroom activity, reviewed and approved the present research direction and source interpretations, and approved this disclosure. The author is responsible for the accuracy, originality and integrity of the manuscript. The author reviewed and approved the style-edited manuscript for public preprint release. Any later journal-submission version will require separate author review and approval.