Economic literacy is a central topic in everybody’s life, and, the more, in young peoples’ vocational and professional orientation. Thus economic education is of great importance both to general and vocational education. Any sort of teaching, and, with this, economics teaching requires highly skilled and well informed teachers. For this reason, in a dynamic world not only the academic studies but also further teacher training has acquired a pivotal role in the quality management of schools.

Given the scarce resources in time and money, a training needs analysis (TNA) of the already active staff is required. It may be important in order to purposively reinforce already given strong points, aiming at the accentuation of a given profile of a school or a teacher. A TNA may be equally important to equalise remaining weaknesses. However, it seems to be appropriate to respect the aspect of voluntariness, which is an important trait of further education. Teachers should be in a position to decide upon in which economics domain they would like to reinforce their knowledge or their abilities. This freedom implies, that suitable diagnostic instruments are at hand. The instruments should enable teachers to evaluate themselves.

In fact, a test of economic literacy is existing. Originally designed by Soper & Walstad 1987, it has been translated into German by Beck & Krumm (1998; Wirtschaftskundlicher-Bildungs-Test) which could be used for the purposes of the pilot study which shall be pre-sented here. This pilot study on economics education of economics teachers was carried out and evaluated in 2008 – 2010 by the universities of Chemnitz (Chair of Vocationomics) and Duisburg-Essen (Chair of Economics Education). It was aiming at finding out about the suit-ability of the TEL on testing the knowledge of economics teachers in lower secondary classes. The TEL, originally designed and validated for the testing of pupils of the age of lower sec-ondary, examines at all levels of taxonomy except for level 5 (synthesis). The contents of the test are (1) basics in general economics, (2) micoeconomics, (3) macroeconomics, and (4) international affairs. The test is lacking, however, any knowledge of accountancy, business administration and finance. Nevertheless, instead of developing a new test right from the be-ginning, it seemed appropriate to make use of the TEL in its German version. This validated version was slightly adapted to the latest developments, as, for instance, many national cur-rencies have disappeared and been replaced by the Euro.

Given the interest of designing a self-evaluation tool, the pilot study was primarily aiming at finding out about the suitability of the items of the TEL for teacher evaluation. Together with this, an analysis of a number of traits of the different participant groups in respect of the di-verging results at solving the test became possible.

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