I would recommend taking a look at the work of Gerlese Åkerlind, especially if you are studying students in Higher Education. Akerlind used the phenomenographic approach to study academics; focusing on important aspects of university life such as their understanding of teaching and learning, being a researcher, developing as a teacher, etc. She also wrote a more general article about phenomenography (I once attended one of her workshops at the EARLI pre-conference).

Take a look at Ellis et al. (2006). How and what university students learn...

Thanks Dr Morgan. I downloaded the article ' Triangulation and integration: processes, claims and implications ' recommended by you. It seems to me an interesting piece of information. I will go through it shortly. Thanks once again.

I came across this very interesting article where a comparison has been made between phenomenographic and phenomenological analysis. :-)

Dear Faraz,

when contemplating phenomenografic analyses with respect to students' learning accounts I found the following papers very helpful resources:

• Wahlström, R., Dahlgren, L. O., Tomson, G., Diwan, V. K., & Beermann, B. (1997). Changing Primary Care Doctors’ Conceptions – A Qualitative Approach to Evaluating an Intervention. Advances in Health Sciences Education, (2), 221–236.
• Wilhelmsson, N., Dahlgren, L. O., Hult, H., Scheja, M., Loka, K., & Josephson, A. (2010). The anatomy of learning anatomy. Advances in Health Sciences Education, (15), 153–165.
• Wilhelmsson, N., Dahlgren, L. O., Hult, H., & Josephson, A. (2011). On the anatomy of understanding. Studies in Higher Education, 1–13
• Dahlgren, L.-O. (1997). Learning Conceptions and Outcomes. In F. Marton, D. Hounsell, & N. Entwistle (Eds.), The Experience of Learning(pp. 23–38). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

And of course all the ground-laying papers by Ference Marton, Roger Säljö, Noel Entwistle..., whom and which you probably already know.

We worked with them in a project (not doing a phenomenografic analysis in the end), which ended in this paper, amongst others:

• Scholkmann, A., Loyens, S. M. M., Koch, F., Roters, B., Ricken, J., & Dahlgren, L.-O. (2018). To understand or not to understand? Evidence and challenges in assessing the potential of Problem-Based Learning (PBL). In N. Schaper & B. Szczyrba (Eds.), Forschungsformate zur evidenzbasierten Fundierung hochschuldidaktischen Handelns(Vol. 1, pp. 157–173). Köln: Cologne Open Science.

Thanks Dr. Scholkmann

These articles seem to me an effective resource of understanding phenomenographic analyses. I will go through them step by step.

In fact, I recently went through Marton and Säljö seminal paper on student learning that provided a fresh perspective for thinking about student learning.

Phenomenography is appealing as Marton's categorized it as a 'second order perspective' of exploring the variation in people’s ways of understanding the phenomenon or a concept.

I would recommend taking a look at the work of Gerlese Åkerlind, especially if you are studying students in Higher Education. Akerlind used the phenomenographic approach to study academics; focusing on important aspects of university life such as their understanding of teaching and learning, being a researcher, developing as a teacher, etc. She also wrote a more general article about phenomenography (I once attended one of her workshops at the EARLI pre-conference).

Hi Faraz. I agree with Gerda: the work by Gerlese Åkerlind is VERY useful into the conducting and analysis stage in phenomenographic research; she is part of the "australian stream" that has deepen into the phenomenographic methods . I'm myself conducting a phenomenographic research for the first time and so I would like to recommend you these valuable sources:

Åkerlind, G. (2012). Variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1), 115-127.

Bowden, J. & Walsh, E. (Eds.). (2000). Phenomenography. Melbourne, Australia: RMIT University Press.

Bowden, J. & Green, P. (Eds.). (2005). Doing Developmental Phenomenography. Melbourne, Australia: RMIT University Press.

If you have any doubts, feel free to ask. I would be happy to help you. Good luck!

Dear Dr Gerda and Mark

A great deal of 'Thanks' for recommending me the work of Gerlese S. Akerlind on phenomenography. I quickly went through her chapter 'Learning about phenomenography' in the book 'Doing developmental phenomenography'. It was indeed her own reflection of the experiences that she went through while doing phenomenographic research. The transition of going beyond ' what' questions to 'why' questions and her 'ah ha' response of satisfaction while unveiling an underlying phenomenon are the very interesting account of information. Nevertheless, she also discussed the challenges associated with it such as large amount of data, but also provided a solution of making the data manageable. Wow

As she concluded that focus of phenomenography should be the 'CRITICAL' aspect of the qualitatively different ways of experiencing rather than every nuance of meaning. Brilliant.

I think phenomenography will definitely provide me an insightful chronicle of the variability of my student's learning experiences with a critical lens, but still I need to learn this approach again, again and again.

I do think Gerlese Akerlind is great, especially the chapters in the book Doing Developmental Phenomenography. In my own case, my students are teachers and I teach them how to teach. I found that what my students say in the interviews are very often different from what they actually do in classrooms (i.e. how they actually enact the object of learning in their teaching). This makes me start to think about using not only interview but also observation to investigate their actual ways of seeing.

Thanks Lam.

This is interesting approach to complement the interview findings by direct observation of 'object of learning'' that your students enact while teaching. In my case, my subjects will be my students. In that case I can get an opinion about the variability of their learning experience and how it influences their metacognitive approach to learning, but a direct observation (though possible) will be 'Time-intensive'.

I would like to thank all of you again, as through your suggestions, I was able to contact the resource person Dr Akerlind.

Hi, Faraz. Reading your last reply, I just noticed that you are working into classroom research. In the book "classroom discourse and the space of learning" (Marton & Tsui, 2004) this topic is treated; also, there is an action research-like methodology called "learning studies" and "lesson studies" which Marton has worked into lately (besides, recently appeared the International Journal of LS and LS where he has contributed a lot).

I think all previous respondents have a point. Overall it has to do with qualitative research analysis.

Study the literature.

Find the codes (key points), nodes (categories of key points) around the topic.

Frame research questions.

Do the interviews (which you have justified as the appropriate data collection method).

Trasncribe.

Identify nodes, codes etcs in the trascripts.

Analyse

Conclude

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Handbook of qualitative research. Sage publications, inc.

Learning studies use a first order perspective to analyze classroom teaching; while phenomenography is a study on the second order perspective. To use the same perspective to study both classroom teaching and student interview (to me, this is more consistent theoretically and philosophically) I adopt phenomenography to do both.

Thanks Mark, Konstantinos and Lam

The discussion is getting more richer and resourceful. Thanks for sharing your experiences and ideas. I would also like to explore the first order perspective of 'Learning studies'. The fundamental aspect will be helpful for understanding the core philosophy , theory and methodology of phenomenography.

Mark, is it possible to get the E book of "Classroom discourse and the space of learning" by Marton and Tsui?

Thanks once again.

Hi Faraz

Yes, very interesting indeed! I don't know, I bought it :S

Dear Friends

A extended question about phenomenographic analysis is drifting in my mind, I hope you people will be able to guide me.

What are the constructs that we need to measure if we would like to use phenomenographic interviews to discern how students variation of learning and their meta-learning capacity would guide them in understanding a troublesome concept? I am looking forward to your opinions. Thanking you in anticipation.