Citizens need good economic understanding in order to act and choose responsibly for themselves and others in the world today. Therefore, economic education in schools becomes crucial. Good learning environments need to take students understanding as their starting point in order to be able to support a fruitful learning process. However, not very much is known about students’ ways of understanding economic concepts and phenomena.

Phenomenography is a research method that is typically used in research on learning in the domains of science. It is a qualitative empirical way to explore students’ concepts of everyday phenomena. Only little research has been done in the field of social sciences and particularly of economic education. Existing research is focusing on prices (e.g. Marton, Pong 2005). We want to present our phenomenographic investigation into high school students and university students understanding of wages.

In 2010, we conducted interviews with 52 students of 10^th and 12^th grade about their concepts of how wages are determined. In 2011, we tested the interview-questions with 40 teacher students to validate our outcome space and to compare different methods of data collection in phenomenography. The most important result of this study with an explorative character was a hierarchically classified ‘outcome space’ with five qualitatively distinct ways of understanding (Birke, Seeber 2011a, 2012).

These conceptions are the basis to initiate lessons based on variation theory. Therefore, exploring students’ concepts of wages is an important starting point for didactic interventions (Birke, Seeber 2011b). Didactic transformation is a focus of phenomenographic theory and variation theory.

At the conference we will present the comprised results of both studies. Firstly, we will give an overview on the research design, secondly we will present the revised outcome space and thirdly discuss the results as well as our modus operandi on the background of recently made critical annotations (Davies 2012) to other phenomenographic research in economic education.

Birke, F., Seeber, G. (2011a), Heterogene Schülerkonzepte für ökonomische Phänomene: ihre Erfassung und Konsequenzen für den Unterricht (Students‘ heterogenous concepts of economic phenomena: How to ascertain these and consequences in the classroom), in: Journal of Social Science Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2011, pp. 45-55. Birke, F.; Seeber, G. (2011b) Präkonzepte als Ausgangspunkt für den Unterricht. Erfassung von Schülervorstellungen zur Lohn- und Preisbildung (Concepts as starting point of instruction. The ascertainment of students‘ views on the building of prices and wages), in: Unterricht Wirtschaft + Politik, 1. Jg., 4/2011, pp. 23-27 Birke, F. Seeber, G. (2012), Lohnunterschiede im Schülerverständnis: eine phänomenographische Untersuchung (Students‘ understanding of differences in wages: a phenomenographic analysis) , in: Retzmann, T. (Ed.), Ökonomische Bildung zwischen Arbeitnehmerorientierung und Entrepreneurship Education, Schwalbach/Ts. (in press) Davies, Peter (2012, in print), Students’ Conceptions of Price, Value and Opportunity cost: some implications for future research, in: Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 10 (2,3). Marton, F. and Pong, W.Y. (2005), On the unit of description in phenomenography, in: Higher Education Research and Development, 24, pp. 335-348.