Discovering Mental Operations in standardized Financial Literacy Test as a Key of Revealing Misunderstanding of Financial Concepts from Young Adults with Migration Background in Germany? – Insights of a qualitative interview study in Germany

Relevance and objectives Migration is a phenomenon that has existed since the beginning of human history and has varied in its intensity as well as its causes and reasons over time (IOM, 2024). Currently, migration is increasing worldwide (McAuliffe & Oucho, 2024) and in Germany and societies are becoming more heterogeneous (FSO, 2021). Just as heterogeneous as the causes and reasons for migration are the ways in which the receiving states and societies deal with migration. In addition to politics and the economy, migration plays a particularly challenging role in the education system in Germany (due to various factors). In order to meet the needs of the heterogeneous student body and to utilize its enriching potential (IOM, 2024), reforms are needed, especially in the education system in Germany. The current situation of teacher training and the current and foreseeable demographic shortage of trained teachers is an example of this. In teacher training, prospective teachers are not adequately prepared for dealing with and teaching heterogeneous classes in a target group-oriented way (Karakasoglu et al., 2017). In addition, there is already a nationwide shortage of teachers, which will intensify over the next five years until 2030 as the baby boomer generation retires from teaching. In order to counteract this shortage of teachers, teachers are being qualified via lateral entry programs that do not correspond to the depth and breadth of training at universities in order to cover the shortage of teachers. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that there are not only too few teachers available, but that they are also sometimes not adequately prepared for the challenges of heterogeneous classes. Not only teacher training, but also the content of economic education in Germany is shaped by a Western perspective on the prevailing economic legal system (Neubäumer, Hewel & Lenk, 2017). Examples of such content are the concepts of market economy and interest rates (Cwynar, 2021; Worthington & Marzuki, 2021). People who grow up in Germany in an environment that is not characterized by Western cultural views face challenges in understanding these concepts. A certain level of financial knowledge is required to be able to make informed financial decisions about protection and provision. In addition, due to the decreasing scope of social security systems, people are increasingly required to make their own financial decisions in order to protect themselves against life risks (old age, illness, job loss, etc.). (Quantitative) Studies for Germany and internationally show that people with migration background (MB) perform worse in these tests and therefore tend to make poorer decisions (Happ & Förster, 2019). The quantitative surveys mainly examine correlations between socio-demographic and socio-economic factors, among others. Only limited insights for educational policy measures can be derived from this. Therefore, more in-depth analyses are needed that explicitly investigate deeper causes and thus offer approaches for educational policy measures. In consideration of this, the study aims to identify challenges in the understanding of economic and financial terms and concepts of young adults with a migration background. Sample and analysis In order to investigate these causes, we conducted a two-part qualitative interview study with 35 young adults (27 people with three different migration backgrounds and, as a comparison group, 8 people without a migration background). In the first part of the interview, we used a guidline interview (Bortz & Döring, 2015) to ask questions about socio-demographic, socio-economic, religious background and family financial socialization. The second part of the interview was a think-aloud interview (Leighton, 2017) with twelve standardized test items in which the respondents were asked to verbally express their answers when solving them. The test items were selected on the basis of quantitative analyses with regard to the correct answers of people with MB and without MB, whereby items from the three content areas of the TFL according to Förster, Happ & Maur (2018) were determined with a large difference, a small difference and no difference for each content area. In addition, three items were selected from the TEL domain (Walstad, Rebeck & Butters, 2013) according to the same principle. Initial findings from these studies revealed, for example, that different or non-existent financial services (voluntary insurance), differences in social security systems (state health insurance vs. statutory health insurance), trust in the financial and banking sector are reasons why people with MB find it more difficult to understand financial products and services (Heidel & Happ, 2023, 2024). In addition, the think-aloud protocols provide information on the mental operations involved in solving the test tasks, from which further insights into challenges in the formation of mental models can be drawn. These findings should be used as a starting point to sensitize teachers to potential hurdles in the teaching-learning process and to offer more differentiated and target group-oriented teaching. In the lecture, findings from the qualitative content analysis of mental operations will be presented and approaches for implementation in target group-oriented educational measures will be presented and discussed.