Tracing Conceptual Change: From Pre-Concepts to Differentiated Concepts of Justice

This study investigates the transformation of students’ pre-concepts of distributive justice into more differentiated and reflective understandings through a structured philosophy les-son series. Based on a constructivist three-phase teaching model, the intervention was im-plemented in four eighth-grade classes and evaluated using a pre-, post-, and follow-up design. A qualitative content analysis, combining theory-driven and inductive category devel-opment, revealed four key justice principles in students’ conceptions: equality, need, merit, and chance. The inductive emergence of the principle of chance illustrates the added value of empirical pre-testing for lesson planning. Post- and follow-up data show increased differentiation in students’ justice concepts, though limitations remain regarding the assessment of their ability to apply these concepts in normative judgments. The study highlights the methodological potential of qualitative content analysis for resource-efficient evaluation in philosophy didactics and calls for a refinement of assessment formats.