International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
International Journal of Educational Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures
Secondary school students’ informal conceptions of complex
economic phenomena
Carmela Aprea *
Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, Via Besso 84, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Received 23 January 2014
Received in revised form 21 September 2014
Accepted 30 September 2014
Available online 22 October 2014
The investigation of informal conceptions has a longstanding tradition in science learning,
whereas respective research efforts concerning economic issues are rather scarce. The
research to be presented here aims to contribute to filling this gap by exploring
adolescents’ informal conceptions of complex economic phenomena. More specifically, a
research study was conducted that is focused on the issue of how secondary school
students conceive and experience phenomena related to financial and economic crises.
This study is informed by two complementary theoretical approaches (i.e. cognitive
psychology and phenomenography) and encompasses data from 56 semi-structured
interviews. These data demonstrate that students have severe difficulties to adequately
understand complex economic phenomena, and often do not realize the influence that
those phenomena exert in their daily lives.
ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Informal conceptions
Secondary economics education
Common sense making
1. Introduction
The consideration of learners’ informal conceptions1 is indispensable for supporting sustainable and meaningful learning
in any domain, primarily because they structure perception and guide attention as well as elaboration and interpretation of
incoming information. Thus, informal conceptions influence subsequent learning, reasoning, and action. Given their
importance, the investigation of these conceptions has a longstanding tradition, especially in science learning (for a
bibliographic overview, see Duit, 2009). In contrast, comparable efforts concerning students’ informal conceptions of social
science in general, and of economic issues in particular are relatively scarce and mostly limited to younger children (e.g., the
pioneering work of Berti & Bombi, 1988). However, as Lundholm and Davies (2013) recently pointed out,
‘‘there is a current ‘‘blind spot’’ of investigations pertaining to the ages of 16 and beyond. This age span is particularly
interesting, as this is where formal education in the social sciences domain increases—along with new experiences of social,
political and economic phenomena. This means that issues of experience, socialization and education can and should be
given central foci and be accounted for. Also, this is a time when adolescents and adults are asked to take part in democratic
and societal decisions and make choices which impact on others and the future’’ (pp. 535–536).
* Tel.: +41 91 960 77 15.
E-mail address: [email protected]
1
Informal conceptions are sometimes also referred to using terms like naı̈ve understandings, lay theories, or subjective theories. However, in this article,
the more neutral terms informal conceptions and preconceptions (or understanding and perceptions as synonyms for conceptions) are preferred because
they avoid preliminary judgments and thus seem to be more in line with recent considerations which regard students’ informal conceptions as necessary
‘stepping stones’ (Wiser & Smith, 2009) to help them building up a more comprehensive understanding of a respective knowledge domain.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2014.09.002
0883-0355/ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
13
The research presented in this article aims to contribute to filling this gap by exploring adolescents’ informal
conceptions of complex economic phenomena. More specifically, an empirical study is described which focuses on the
question of how secondary school students understand and experience phenomena related to financial and economic
crises. This topic was chosen because of its central position in contemporary economic debate and its high profile in the
media. It is also a complex economic phenomenon which is highly demanding as they tend to be multi-faceted, intangible,
and systemic in nature (e.g., Ajello, 2002). The study is mainly driven by an educational interest: it intends to broaden the
available evidence regarding students’ informal conceptual understanding of complex economic phenomena in order to be
able to adequately adjust the design and delivery of formal curriculum and instruction. The research activities adhere to a
comprehensive view of how economic and particularly financial issues should be involved in education. This view
particularly emphasizes the importance of understanding complex economic phenomena in promoting students’ capacity
to become active citizens in modern democracies (e.g., Davies, 2012). In addition to this overarching orientation, the study
is informed by key findings from empirical research on adolescents’ informal conceptions in the domain of economics,
which are summarized in the following Section 1.1. Moreover, it is premised on two general theoretical approaches for
investigating informal conceptions. These approaches, and the respective research questions they entail, are also outlined
in the remainder of this Section 1.2. Section 2 then describes the method of the study, while Section 3 presents the results.
Finally, Section 4 discusses these results and draws conclusions for the design of formal curricula and instruction as well as
for further research needs.
1.1. Summary of key findings from empirical research on adolescents’ informal conceptions in the domain of economics
As previously mentioned, empirical research on adolescents’ informal conceptions in the domain of economics is quite
rare. However, a few inquiries with this target group exist that can inform imminent research initiatives. Given their
pertinence with regard to the specific focus considered in this article, two additional studies concerning adults’ perceptions
of the financial and economic crisis are also included (cf. Leiser, Burgeois-Gironde, & Benita, 2010, and Roland-Levy,
Pappalardo Boumelki, & Guillet, 2010).2 Taken together, the results of these investigations suggest the following key
challenges for learning and teaching:
(i) The available studies mirror well-known evidence from other cognitively demanding domains, which conveys that
students are inclined to perceive and understand complex phenomena in the light of their everyday experience (e.g.,
Reiner, Slotta, Chi, & Resnick, 2000), whereas more scientific concepts are often—if ever—portrayed and used only
superficially (e.g., at the level of the formal language use). Respective results have, for example, been reported by Leiser
and Drori (2005), who found that lay persons tend to perceive inflation as something that – comparable to an illness –
‘‘befalls’’ prices and money.
(ii) Moreover, economic phenomena are usually represented in a simplistic and unidirectional way. This is in sharp contrast
to their multifaceted and dynamic nature, and to explanations from economic theory, which treats these phenomena as
outcomes of interactive systems. This problem is, for example, corroborated by research studies on price determination,
which showed that – even after instruction and at high levels of the educational system – some learners tend to resist
switching from a mono-causal model of price determination to one that considers the dynamic interaction of supply and
demand as constituting mechanism (e.g., Marton & Pang, 2008; comparable findings are obtained with regard to wages,
as demonstrated in the study of Birke and Seeber (2012) or interest on credits as shown by Speer and Seeber (2013)).
(iii) Additional evidence for a lack of systemic understanding comes from Leiser et al. (2010), who investigated adult lay
person’s perceptions of the financial crisis in six different countries. In their large-scale study, two major conceptions
appeared, one seeing the economy comprised of individuals, with failings of moral or cognitive character, and the other
seeing the economy as a complex system, functioning in cycles. This prevalent tendency to interpret systemic issues in a
predominately individualistic perspective is particularly troublesome when it comes to an understanding of phenomena
that require a transition from the micro- to the macro-perspective or from individual agency and motivation to
structures (Lundholm & Davies, 2013).
(iv) These latter findings also delineate a somewhat different situation as in the case of science where common sense notions
ascribe sentient purposes to inanimate objects and animal behavior whereas scientific explanations ascribe phenomena
to underling systems which operate in the material world (Chi et al.,1994). In social science, the behavior of individuals
may be understood in terms of their beliefs and purposes, whilst the outcomes of individuals’ actions is understood in
terms of systems which co-ordinate actions and normalize beliefs, or as Lundholm and Davies (2013, p. 517) state,
‘‘economic phenomena are embedded in economic systems and conceptions of economic phenomena are embedded in
conceptions of economic systems.’’
(v) Unsurprisingly, young people often struggle to understand the nature and purpose of economic and financial policy
systems (such as taxation) which are designed to produce different outcomes from those that would otherwise occur as
a consequence of systematic interaction between unequal individuals with diverse beliefs and tastes (Furnham, 2005)
2
Given the fact that the study at hand addresses the target group of adolescents, the available research on children’s conceptions is excluded from the
subsequent literature review. For a respective account cf. for instance Webley (2005).
14
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
Besides the identification of these challenges, the studies on hand also allow to discern gaps in research on students’
informal conceptions in the domain of economics, which, inter alia, include the following aspects:
(1) Students’ informal conceptions are expressions of individual viewpoints, and are thus necessarily embedded into
systems of emotions and values, which are in turn influenced by students’ personal involvement (Gardner, 2006). The
importance of these emotional and personal connotations for human thinking and learning has not only been
impressively demonstrated by different branches of psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2007) as well as by
current research on ‘warm’ conceptual change in science (e.g., Mason et al., 2008; Sinatra & Mason, 2008) but is also
renown in literature reviews on students’ conceptions in economics (cf. Lundholm & Davies, 2013) and corroborated by
research on adults’ perceptions of the economic and financial crisis (e.g., Roland-Levy et al., 2010). Nevertheless, these
aspects are still underexplored in the prevailing studies.3
(2) In addition to the cognitive focus, the existing evidence stems from studies which investigated a limited number of
concepts or notions such as taxation or inflation without necessarily considering how these concepts are connected to
additional phenomena from the broader economic and/or societal context.4 However, the specific nature of economic
phenomena which was delineated above, seems to underscore a particular need to broaden our knowledge of students’
systemic understanding, thereby putting a specific focus on the investigation of their informal conceptions of less
tangible and more abstract macro phenomena.
The research study on adolescents’ informal conceptions of the financial and economic crisis which is presented in this
article tries to account for these suggestions by adopting two theoretical approaches which are outlined in the following subsection.
1.2. Theoretical approaches for investigating students’ informal conceptions
The research study is informed by two different theoretical approaches – cognitive psychology and phenomenography –
which focus on different aspect of students’ informal conceptions. In cognitive psychology, informal conceptions are
typically theorized as mental representations (e.g., Gardner, 2006; Markman, 1999). Mental representations are hypothetical
internal knowledge structures and, as such, are considered relatively stable personal traits. According to cognitive
psychology, these structures are developed and formed by the processing (i.e., selection, organization, integration, storing,
and retrieval) of information that individuals gain from their experience or from their imagination. Mental representations
can thus embody objects, events, settings, or any other entity from the external world, but they might also encompass things
that a person has never experienced (e.g., traveling to a personally unknown place) as well as things that do not exist at all
(e.g., having a third arm). Moreover, mental representations consist of elements at different levels or grain sizes – notably, at
a rather fundamental level as terms or notions or at a more comprehensive level of meaning attribution as concepts or
schemata. These elements are the building blocks of more complex conceptual networks or so-called mental models
(Sternberg, 2011).
Within the cognitive psychology perspective, the elaborateness of learners’ conceptions is of specific interest, which is
frequently defined in terms of the scope and accuracy of the elements of a conception. Moreover, structural characteristics
such as the interconnection of these elements are also considered (e.g., Barnett & Ceci, 2004). As aforementioned, these
features of students’ conceptions are usually compared to an external benchmark, that is an expert or official conception,
which represents a scientific account of the issue at hand (e.g., Hmelo-Silver & Green Pfeffer, 2004). The cognitive psychology
approach might thus be considered as a nomothetic approach (Driver & Easley, 1978). This might also include the detection
of typical errors, difficulties in understanding, or misconceptions that are distinctive for a particular content domain. In
addition, cognitive psychologists often try to specify relevant individual factors that influence the elaborateness of students’
conceptions. Whereas older studies mainly focus on cognitive learner characteristics, notably prior domain knowledge (e.g.,
Bransford, Brown, & Cooking, 2000; Roschelle, 1995), more recent considerations specifically underline the role of
motivational aspects, such as for example the impact of domain-related interest (e.g., Murphy, Alexander, & Muis, 2012). In
accordance with the considerations outlined in the previous sub-section, the crucial role of emotions and values is moreover
increasingly acknowledged (e.g., Robinsohn, Watkins, & Harmon-Jones, 2013).
With regard to the research topic of this article, the cognitive psychology approach gives raise to the following two groups
of research questions:
(1) Elaborateness of adolescents’ informal conceptions: (a) How elaborate are adolescents’ informal conceptions of the financial
and economic crisis? (b) Is the degree of elaborateness influenced by prior economic knowledge and domain-related
interest? and (c) What errors, difficulties of understanding, or misconceptions emerge?
3
For one rare exception cf. Davies and Lundholm (2012) who explore the reasoning of adolescents and young adults with regard to the question of
whether a good or service should be provided for free.
4
For an exception cf. Ignell, Davies, and Lundholm (2013) who investigated ‘‘how students conceptualize the relationships between the economic
dimension of human activity and negative environmental impact, such as climate change.’’ (983).
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
15
(2) Emotional and personal connotations of adolescents’ informal conceptions: (a) Which emotions do adolescents voice with
regard to the crisis? and (b) Do they perceive themselves as personally affected by the crisis and/or do they think that the
crisis will influence their private and professional life in the future?
The cognitive psychology approach is rather analytical in nature. In contrast, phenomenography tackles learners’ prior
conceptions in a more synthetic and holistic way. According to Marton and Pang (2008, p. 536), the ‘‘object of research of
phenomenography is the qualitatively different ways in which people are aware of the world, and the ways in which they
experience various phenomena and situations around them.’’ In other words, phenomenography is concerned with
reconstructing how things appear to and are understood by people.5 It can thus be considered as ideographic approach
(Driver & Easley, 1978). However, this does not mean that everyone understands the phenomenon in his or her unique way;
rather, a qualitatively different, but limited set of ways of understanding can be derived based on an internal logic (Booth,
1997). Phenomenography adopts a non-dualistic view of human consciousness in which understanding is considered an
intentional form of the human–world relationship. Thus, the object (i.e., the phenomenon under investigation) and the
subjects (i.e., the people experiencing the phenomenon) are not viewed separately. In fact, these inseparable subject–object
relations are constitutive for conceptions: They represent various meanings associated with the specific phenomenon of
interest, including the similarities and difference in those meanings. When combined, these variations portray the
phenomenon as a whole and this specific combination is termed an ‘outcome space’ (e.g., Marton & Booth, 1997). Outcome
spaces are hierarchically structured as a set of related categories of description of the specific phenomenon. These categories
denote distinctively different ways of seeing the phenomenon and, thus, describe the variation in the possible ways of
experiencing it. They are ordered according to their logical complexity and inclusiveness, which in turn is established by socalled dimensions or structural characteristics of variation. As Herbert and Pierce (2013, p. 2) state,
‘‘[t]hese dimensions highlight the changes in awareness of the critical features of the phenomenon under investigation.
More sophisticated conceptions are differentiated from less sophisticated conceptions by the awareness of different or
additional values of a dimension or the discernment of more dimensions.
From these considerations concerning the phenomenographic approach, a third group of research questions can be
derived as follows:
(1) Variations of adolescents’ informal conceptions: (a) What variations in the outcome space of adolescents’ informal
conceptions of the financial and economic crisis can be identified? and (b) Which structural characteristics describe
them?
As should have become clear from this section, the two approaches can be considered as complementary. Whereas
cognitive psychology helps to elucidate how and why informal conceptions differ from expert or official representations,
phenomenography is particularly useful for exploring how and with regard to which characteristics they vary among each
other. Therefore, both approaches are expected to offer specific insights concerning the ultimate aim of the prevailing
research (i.e., to broaden the available evidence regarding students’ informal conceptual understanding of complex
economic phenomena in order to be able to adequately adjust the design and delivery of formal curriculum and instruction).
In order to answer the three groups of research questions, they were thus merged within a single multiple-perspective
research strategy. This strategy will be described next.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
The study involved 56 students, 14–19 years old (M = 15.98 years), from public secondary schools in BadenWuerttemberg (Germany). Females accounted for 58% of the sample. Nearly half of the students went to a middle school
(Realschule). The other half went to an economics- and business-oriented vocational college, and was thus expected to have
some basic domain knowledge background. Therefore, the sample was balanced with respect to this aspect. Students in both
schools were considered to be ‘‘average’’ students – that is, not particularly low or high achieving. As confirmed by the
teachers, they all came from a comparable lower-middle class socio-economic background. A further commonality was the
fact that both groups of students were about to decide their professional futures – that is, either finding a job or an apprentice
position or deciding to continue with school-based education, if their grade point averages allowed this option. The sample
was determined by the availability of the teachers to participate in the study, and thus has to be considered as a convenience
sample with possible biases. The study was approved by the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, the school
authorities, and the parents’ council.
5
It is to be noted that a quite similar objective is pursued by other approaches such as the ‘alterative frameworks’ approach of conceptual change
suggested by Halldén, Scheja, and Haglund (2008). It should thus be underlined that the approach proposed here is by no means intended to be viewed as
contrast to other possible procedures.
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
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2.2. Data collection
Semi-structured individual interviews were used to gather data. This methodological decision was based on the following
considerations: on one hand, the data collection method should leave enough space for students to express their
spontaneous and genuine personal ideas, especially at this early stage of research. An over-structuration of the data
collection instrument should thus be avoided, and possibilities for one-to-one dialogue and clarifications should be provided.
For these reasons, written essays or focus groups were excluded. On the other hand, it was also important to prevent overly
excessive demands. In this regard, it was assumed that a completely open-ended approach might have required contentrelated and articulation abilities that probably go beyond the scope of ordinary secondary school students.
The interviews were conducted in spring 2009 when the sub-prime crisis was very prominent in political discussion and
news reporting in Germany. After being briefly informed about the research goals and providing their consent to participate
in the study, students were asked the following questions:
What do you know about the onset and origin, the causes, the progression, and the impact of the financial and economic
crisis? What can the German government do to deal with the crisis?
In your opinion, how did the crisis come to Germany?
Are you personally concerned about the crisis?
What do you feel when you think about the crisis?
Do you think that the crisis will have any consequences for your future life? If yes, what do they look like and how would
you cope with them?
Students were also asked to rate, on a four-level Likert-scale, the degree to which they consider themselves interested in
economic and financial issues. The interviews lasted on average 18 min and were conducted during regular class hours in a
separate classroom. The assignment of individual students to the interview appointments was done in collaboration with the
teachers.
2.3. Data analysis
All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed by using a three steps procedure, as detailed below.
However, it is to note that these steps are independent from each other in the sense that they separately reconsider the whole
transcripts according to the focus of the respective research questions described in Section 1.2.
(1) Expert conceptions of the financial and economic crisis were identified for use as benchmarks against which to judge the
elaboratedness of students’ conceptions (research question 1). For this purpose, a content analysis of journalistic texts
and educational materials on the financial and economic crisis was conducted and cross-validated with two domain
experts (one lecturer in economics and one business and economics school teacher). This analysis brought out five
building elements (concepts) of the benchmark conception: (1) the onset and origin, (2) the causes, (3) the progression,
and (4) the impact of the financial and economic crisis as well as (5) the governments’ measures against it. The
assessment of students’ conceptions was then done by using an assessment rubric that, in a slightly different form, has
already proven useful with regard to other economic phenomena in previous studies (e.g., Aprea & Ebner, 2008). This
rubric, which ranges from 0 to 2, is depicted in Table 1.
Complying with the considerations in the section discussing the cognitive psychology approach, the rubric
operationalized elaborateness by using the scope and accuracy of the single elements as well as their interconnection
as relevant indicators. For each interviewed student, the utterances concerning the single elements were coded from the
Table 1
Rubric for assessing the elaborateness of students’ conceptions of the financial and economic crisis.
Indicators of
elaborateness
0
No conception
1
Fragmented conception
2
Elaborate conception
Scope and accuracy The concepts related to the financial
and economic crises (onset and origin,
causes, progression, impact, government
measures) are . . .
. . . not at all or only rudi-mentarily . . . largely mentioned, but not detailed.
. . . mentioned, detailed, and
mentioned in the utterances.
or
contains no serious mistakes.
. . . mentioned and detailed, but contain serious mistakes.
The relationships between the concepts related to the financial and economic crises (onset and origin, causes, progression,
Interconnection
impact, government measures) are . . .
. . . not at all explained.
. . . explained, but in an unsystematic or
. . . largely systematically and
even wrong way.
accurately explained.
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
17
transcripts, and then rated according to the levels of the rubric. A value of 0 was assigned, if a specific concept (or the
interrelation between the concepts) were not at all or only very shallowly mentioned in the interview transcript. A value of
1 was allotted if a concept was mentioned but not explained in detail or even explained in a wrong way. This was for example
applied, if a student mentioned inter-banking exchange as a cause of the financial crisis, but could not explain how this
contributed to its emergence. If, however, such an explanation was provided, a value of 2 was assigned. One primary
researcher conducted the majority of this analysis, and a second independent research assistant coded and rated 20% of the
transcripts. The inter-rater consensus calculated for this subsample ranged between 0.92 (for the ratings of the
interconnection of the concepts) and 0.98 (for ratings of the concept ‘‘onset and origin of the crisis’’). Next, the ratings per
element and the rating of their interconnection were used to calculate a sum score of elaborateness as the unweighted
average of the single scores, which consequently also ranged from 0 to 2. In addition to these descriptive analyses, t-tests
were conducted to determine whether elaborateness as measured by the single scores and the sum scores varies with
respect to different levels of prior economic knowledge (i.e., between students from middle school and students from
economic and business vocational college) and with respect to different levels of interest in economic and financial issues.
Gender was also considered as co-variate because it proved to have an influence according to recent surveys on financial
issues (e.g., Hung, Yoong, & Brown, 2012). Finally, additional in-depth qualitative analyses of students’ responses were
accomplished to detect typical errors, difficulties, and/or misconceptions in their evolving representations of the financial
and economic crisis.
(1) With regard to the second group of research questions, students’ statements about their emotions and their personal
involvement concerning the crisis were also extracted from the interview transcripts and, where appropriate,
categorized according to the emotion classification scheme of Schmidt-Atzert and Ströhm (1983), which distinguishes
the (negative) emotions of reluctance, anger, envy, anxiety, fear, sadness, and shame. Respective frequencies of
designations were calculated.
(2) Finally, the third step was dedicated to the last group of research questions, that is to identify variations in the outcome
space of students’ conceptions of the financial and economic crises as well as the respective structural characteristics that
constitute them. This step went back to the transcripts as a whole, and was informed by methodological
recommendations from the phenomenographic literature (e.g., Åkerlind, 2005) and adopted it similarly to an approach
used by Asikainen, Virtanen, Parpala, & Lindblom-Yläne (2013). It particularly encompassed the following recursive
moves: (1) repeated reading of the complete transcripts; (2) tentative extraction of central differences in students’
utterances; (3) identification of structural characteristics; and (4) drafting and refinement of a distinct set of categories of
description. The results of these moves (i.e., the categorical descriptions and the structural characteristics which together
form the outcome space of students’ conceptions of the financial and economic crisis) were validated by two other
researchers who were not involved in conducting the study. After saturation in data analysis and interpretation was
achieved, each participating student was assigned to one of the emerging category according to the main emphasis of his
or her argumentation, and again, frequencies of designation were calculated.
With regard to the three groups of research questions, the following results emerged.
3. Results
3.1. Elaborateness of secondary school students’ informal conceptions of the financial and economic crisis
According to Table 2, the elaborateness of students’ conceptions regarding the financial and economic crisis was generally
rather low. Moreover, the data reveal a significant association related to students’ interest, with highly interested persons
outperforming their less interested peers on every indicator of elaborateness at the a = 0.01 level. With regard to prior
Table 2
Means and standard deviations for the elaborateness indicators of students’ informal conceptions of the financial and economic crisis for the whole sample
as well as for students with different degrees of domain knowledge (middle-schools versus economics and business vocational college) and different
degrees of interest (high versus low) in economic and financial concerns.
Concepts
Onset and origin
Causes
Progression
Impact
Measures
Interconnection
Total Ø
Whole sample
N = 56
Middle school
M (SD) N = 29
Economics & business
coll. M (SD) N = 27
a
Low interest
M (SD) N = 40
High interest
M (SD) N = 16
a
1.00
0.57
0.46
0.80
0.50
0.52
0.64
0.93
0.48
0.28
0.72
0.38
0.41
0.53
1.07
0.68
0.68
0.89
0.63
0.63
0.76
n.s.
n.s.
.05
n.s.
.10
n.s.
.10
0.80
0.32
0.18
0.65
0.25
0.13
0.39
1.50
1.17
1.17
1.08
1.12
1.50
1.28
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
(0.54)
(0.60)
(0.66)
(0.52)
(0.61)
(0.76)
(0.49)
(0.46)
(0.51)
(0.45)
(0.59)
(0.62)
(0.68)
(0.43)
(0.62)
(0.70)
(0.78)
(0.42)
(0.56)
(0.83)
(0.54)
(0.41)
(0.47)
(0.38)
(0.58)
(0.43)
(0.40)
(0.27)
(0.52)
(0.40)
(0.65)
(0.40)
(0.50)
(0.51)
(0.29)
18
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
knowledge, a significant effect was shown only for the elaborateness of students’ accounts of the progression of the financial
and economic crisis. In addition, a tendency toward better performance of students from the economics and business
vocational college appeared with respect to the elaborateness of their understanding of measures that the government can
take in order to deal with the crisis. No significant effect of gender could be found.
From the in-depth analysis of students’ responses, the following errors, difficulties, and misconceptions with regard to
their understanding of the financial and economic crisis were detected:
A typical error concerning the first concept was that approximately one-third of the students were confused with respect
to the actual beginning of the crisis, with approximately 70% of them thinking that it began in spring 2009, when they
heard about it for the first time. In contrast, the origin of the crisis was mostly correctly located in the United States.
Whereas more than two-thirds of the students were indeed capable to identify the massive rise of loans extended to
customers of low credit standing and the bursting of the real estate bubble (generally known as the Subprime crisis) as
departing causes of the financial and economic crisis, only about 35% mentioned spill-over effects to the banks, and only six
students could explain the interbank transfer mechanism. Potentially detrimental features of innovative financial
products, such as the securization of accounts, were only stated in three cases, and more systemic reasons such as
deregulation, over-leveraging, incorrect pricing of risk, or inherent instabilities of financial capitalism were not mentioned
at all.
The rather unfavorable picture is further exacerbated with regard to the progression of the crisis. As one might expect from
the weak conceptual understanding of the causes, students were rarely able to explain how the financial crisis spread to
the real economy, although most of them could at least name its more noticeable effects, such as unemployment or shortterm work. This weakness was also mirrored in their answers to the question of how the crisis came to Germany. Most
students had no spontaneous idea. However, when prompted to hypothesize a possible transmitting mechanism, typical
answers were that the German state or the German banks wanted to help the American citizens or their American
colleagues, respectively.
Finally, students had quite a restricted view of governmental measures against the crisis. If able to answer at all, they were
only able to state, not explain, those measures that at that time gained much attention in the media (e.g., public spending
on infrastructure or the car scrap bonus, which was intended to stabilize the domestic car market). As with the causes,
measures that tackle the problem at a system level (e.g., measures to stabilize the banking system or introduce a tax on
financial transactions) seemed to be beyond students’ conceptual horizon.
3.2. Affective and personal connotations of secondary school students’ informal conceptions of the financial and economic crisis
The most prevalent emotions and personal connotations concerning the financial and economic crisis were anxiety and
anger. When asked about possible future consequences, approximately half of the students were afraid of not finding an
adequate apprenticeship or job position. Students mainly felt angry because, in their view, the banks and the bankers
behaved in a grossly negligent manner (stated in 15 interviews). In addition, their anger was directed toward the politicians,
who were not able to prevent the crisis (13 mentions). Moreover, three students blamed America or the Americans in general
for having caused the crisis.
Besides feelings of anxiety and anger, nine students felt pity for Americans who lost their houses and jobs and for German
families concerned with the crisis, who they deemed were increasingly less able to afford an adequate standard of living.
3.3. Variations of secondary school students’ informal conceptions of the financial and economic crisis
As depicted in Table 3, different conceptions could be reconstructed, varying with respect to whether students’ awareness
of three different facets of the crisis was given or not. These facets are (1) awareness of the existence of the crisis, (2)
awareness of the development and the causes of the crisis, and (3) awareness of personal consequences of the crisis.
(1) Denial of the crisis. The first conception is characterized by a lack of awareness of all three facets. In this conception, the
crisis is viewed as something that employers or politicians have invented in order to assert their own interests and to
fleece employees and voters. This position is evident in the following excerpts:
Excerpt 5. ‘‘It is not possible that companies are really doing so badly. They simply force people to work short-time in
order to save money.’’
Excerpt 11. ‘‘Politicians fuel our fears. They want us to believe that they are the heroes. Once we do believe them, we
will vote for them. Then they will do whatever they want.’’
Because in this conception the crisis appears as something that is constructed but not yet existent, it was termed
‘‘denial of the crisis’’. The lack of awareness of the existence of the crisis is accompanied by a lack of any clear idea about
its causes, progression or impact. The two students cited above also reported that they are not interested in and do not
follow any news about the crisis in the media. When asked about any personal consequences, they reacted with
indifference (‘‘I don’t care at all’’, ‘‘The crisis leaves me cold’’).
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
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Table 3
Variations of secondary school students’ informal conceptions.
Awareness of the existence of the crisis
Awareness of the development and causes of the crisis
Awareness of personal consequences
‘‘Denial’’
‘‘Magical thinking’’
‘‘Optimism’’
‘‘Realism’’
—
—
—
H
—
—
H
H
—
H
H
H
— = Awareness not demonstrated; H = Awareness demonstrated.
(2) Magical thinking. In the second conception, which was predominant in nearly half of the sample, students realized the
crisis in terms of its more immediate manifestation, i.e. they stated an increased unemployment rate or noticed that
some people have lost their bank deposits. However, this group also lacked awareness of root causes and refused
acknowledgement of any long-term consequences that the crisis may have in general and for their personal lives. Typical
examples of this type of argumentation are as follows.
Excerpt 13. ‘‘I don’t think that the crisis will influence my life because I am sure we are out of the woods in about a
month.’’
Excerpt 50. ‘‘There are less job offers but I am sure this will be fixed quite soon. In any case, I think that this does not
influence the opportunity to find an apprenticeship position. It can’t get worse anyway.’’
In a kind of ‘‘magical thinking,’’ they argued that things will turn out positively in the end, without having a clear idea
of how this could be the case.
(3) Optimism. Nearly one-third of the students were not only aware of the existence of the crisis, but could also give
acceptable explanations about its development and causes. However, even though they acknowledged potential
detrimental effects of the crisis, they believed that this would have no serious consequences for themselves due to their
outstanding personal resources (e.g., qualifications, self-esteem or contacts to powerful groups), as witnessed by the
following quotations:
Excerpt 9. ‘‘I think it will not be easy to find an apprenticeship position. However, you will do it if you believe in
yourself. You need to strongly believe in yourself.’’
Excerpt 15. ‘‘I know that life will be harder for my generation but my parents have a lot of contacts with the world of
work. I think this will help me finding a job.’’
This conception is thus characterized by an excessive optimism and by a marked inclination to respond to the crisis
with an elevation of individual efforts, whereas factors that are beyond the scope of one’s personal influence were not
considered.
Realism. In contrast, the remaining students showed more realistic appraisals, i.e. they were aware that the crisis could
have systemic effects which elude individual effort. One student, for example, mentioned that the crisis would endanger
the pension system. Another student argued that the crisis could have detrimental effects on young generations
possibilities to acquire property ownership. Based on these considerations, students in this group were aware that the
crisis and its effects may raise to question the prevailing value system. Examples for this kind of discourse are given
below:
Excerpt 17. ‘‘I hope that I can maintain the life standard of my parents. I am not sure. However, maybe the crisis urges
us to reconsider what we really deem as important.’’
Excerpt 25. ‘‘The crisis does not concern everybody to the same extent. It will probably diminish our opportunities in
life. It will be harder to get a job application even though you might be smart. I think this is not fair.’’
Even though these students did fortunately not seem to fall into a deep depression, they were aware of potential
pitfalls beyond their personal effort. In this sense, their conceptions were more realistic than those of their optimistic
peers.
4. Discussion and conclusions
This article presented research activities that were concerned with investigating adolescents’ informal conceptions of
complex economic phenomena. More specifically, an empirical study was described which explored how secondary school
students perceived and understood the 2008 financial and economic crisis. The study adopted a multi-perspective approach
which combined considerations from cognitivist and phenomenographic research on students’ conceptions. The intentions
of the study were twofold: First, to augment the scientific understanding of adolescents’ conceptions in the domain of
economics, and second, to identify the relevant pre-conditions of learning in order to adequately adjust the design of
curriculum and instruction. With a view on these purposes, the results of the study may be interpreted as follows:
The data confirm that complex economic phenomena are scarcely understood and that there seems to be a fairly big divide
between adolescents’ understanding of these phenomena and relevant scientific accounts. This is to be noted particularly
with regard to the elaborateness of students’ conceptions of the financial and economic crisis. In contrast to what would
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C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
have been expected, these results indicate that for most of the fundamental concepts even students from economics and
business vocational colleges, who should possess some background knowledge in the field, did not demonstrate a
substantially deeper understanding than their less instructed peers. Although this result might in part be due to some
limitations of the study – notably small sample size and maybe too general operationalization of prior knowledge, as will
be detailed later – it may give reason to question the effectiveness of current practices of curriculum design, which often
solely focus on rote memorization of facts instead of fostering problem-oriented learning and knowledge transfer. This
assumption seems to be further supported by the findings from the in-depth analysis of common difficulties and
misconceptions, which also reveals that students tend to be rather one-sided in their argumentation, and inclined to use
their everyday experience when trying to fill potential gaps in their understanding of the issue at hand. Taken together,
these results specifically illustrate the need to carefully consider the question of how to guide students in transcending
from an argumentation which is based on individual agency and motivation toward thinking in systems and structures. A
strategy that graduates from more personally-oriented practices (like, for instance, private credits) to more systemic
phenomena (such as the functioning of financial markets), combined with efforts to make evident the relevant shifts in
argumentation, might be a promising idea in this respect. In addition, the results once again demonstrate the crucial role of
domain-specific interest.
The study, however, does not only substantiate results from prior investigations but also goes beyond the available
evidence in that it explicitly took account of the emotional and personal embedding of adolescents’ conceptions of complex
economic phenomena as well as the relation of these conceptions to the broader economic context. It moreover basically
confirms and extends what is known from research on adults lay perceptions of the crisis (cf. Leiser et al., 2010 as well as
Roland-Levy et al., 2010). It is the phenomenographic analysis in particular that provides advanced insights into the
diversity of students’ conceptions, and leads to the assumption that this diversity needs to be addressed by means of
adaptive instructional strategies. While informative instruction, for instance, on the financial and economic crisis might
prove to be useful for building or deepening the understanding of students who are already aware of the crisis, it is quite
likely that this approach loses its effectiveness with students who ignore its existence. Moreover, students with a
somewhat over-optimistic attitude may profit from instruction that underlines the long-term effects of the crisis. In
addition to these considerations, the data also suggest that economic phenomena seem to be considered as something that
has not much to do with students’ personal lives. On the one hand, this perceived distance might be attributable to the
extreme complexity and abstractness of the contents related to the financial and economic crisis. Given these challenges,
students may feel overwhelmed and thus simply lose interest in this specific topic. It might, on the other hand, also be
caused by a more general lack of interest in and perceived significance of economic phenomena, as is suggested by
respective survey data in the German context (e.g. Bankenverband, 2012; Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2009). In any case, when
combined with the aforementioned results concerning the influence of domain-specific interest, this observation stresses
the need for making economics more appealing and relevant to young people.
In sum, it can be concluded that the study provided useful information for substantiating and amplifying the available
empirical evidence on adolescents’ informal understanding of complex economic phenomena, and allowed to derive initial
suggestions of how this understanding might be supported by the design of formal curricula and instruction. However, given
the early stage of the research on students’ conceptions of economic phenomena in general, and the explorative character of
the study in specific, caution in interpreting the findings is of course advisable, and additional research is certainly needed to
further warrant these claims. With regard to future studies, the following methodological issues should be considered in
particular:
As already mentioned, one limitation of the study concerns the sampling. Thus, first and foremost, a more systematically
constructed and possibly also more heterogeneous and larger sample is to be considered in order to validate the obtained
results. In this regard, a follow up study is being currently conducted, which besides Germany encompasses also
Switzerland and Italy. Moreover, this study covers a wide range of the life span, including lower and upper secondary
students with different socio-economic backgrounds, university students of economics and educational sciences as well as
elderly people.
Besides, matters of validity of the data collection methods need to be addressed. This could be done by posing the interview
questions in different ways (e.g., Davies, Syed, & Appleyard, 2013; Lundholm & Davies, 2013) and/or by combining the
interviews with other types of data collection instruments, like, for instance, problem-solving tasks (e.g., Hmelo-Silver &
Green Pfeffer, 2004). In this respect, the inclusion of different representation forms such as graphical representations (e.g.,
Aprea & Ebner, 2008) or gestures (e.g., Herbert & Pierce, 2013) could also be considered.
Finally, a more precise measure for prior domain knowledge is certainly needed, possibly entailing tests of students’
abilities in the field of economics and finance as well as information concerning their respective experience in the
curriculum. Moreover, additional covariates like students’ average school achievement or their general capabilities
concerning reasoning, argumentation and reflection could be of interest.
In addition to these methodological concerns, further research should address the following issues: From a theoretical
perspective, it would be interesting and important to explore if and how theoretical accounts of students’ informal
conceptions and of conceptual change which come from research on science and science learning also apply to matters in
C. Aprea / International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015) 12–22
21
social science, and economics in particular (for respective hypotheses see Lundholm & Davies, 2013). Moreover, from an
empirical point of view, two important questions arise: First, it should be investigated how student’s conceptions of complex
economic phenomena influence subsequent learning, and second, it should be explored how conceptual change in
economics can be supported.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to warmly thank the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments on an earlier version of the
paper. In addition, special thanks go to Mr. Dipl.-Hdl. Markus Lipps who was involved in the study during his diploma thesis,
as well as to the school authorities and teachers who made the study possible, and the students who participated in the
interviews.
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