The Teacher Education Panel Study (TEPS) is a comprehensive study on the implementation of teacher education in Norway.
To provide a holistic picture, TEPS traces both teacher education students, study programs, and institutions over time.
The main goal of TEPS is to create a comprehensive research infrastructure on the implementation of teacher education that allows for the comparison of different teacher education programs and institutions over time.
More about the project
Purpose of the project
The TEPS infrastructure’s key purpose is to serve as a database for high-quality educational scientific research on teacher education in Norway. Thereby should the infrastructure also serve as an evidence base for the quality management and improvement of teacher education in Norway.
For both purposes, it is essential to use systematic data that paints a holistic picture of teacher education and reflects the increasingly complex job demands of the teaching profession.
Achieving this holistic panel study is ensured through a modular design. This design makes it possible to
- put tailored expert teams in charge
- construct and optimize different parts in parallel
- give users customized access to parts of the panel
- flexibly connect to in-depth research projects
The modules are at institution, course or student level, are conducted every semester or only once per student, involve different data sources (questionnaire, text analysis and register data) and allow both more open and restricted data access.
In all modules, quantitative data will be created, documented, stored and published. The panel study targets a wide variety of users, including researchers from Norway and other countries and from different disciplines.
The panel study delivers both cross-sectional and longitudinal data designed to answer a plethora of research questions that are of societal and research importance, such as:
- Which elements of teacher education can be improved according to student teachers and teacher educators?
- To what extent do teacher education institutions differ in the way they organize and implement teacher education?
- How can student teachers be best prepared for the transition to work to prevent practice shock?
Current status
In 2023 and 2024, a number of (pre-)pilot projects were carried out to test the feasibility of TEPS. For example, in the master's thesis module, we piloted if artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to categorize master theses by topic, data and method.
A team has used summaries of master theses published at OsloMet to test whether a large language model can code these texts as well as humans on the basis of a developed coding scheme. The findings suggest that the AI strategy is suitable for categorizing all teacher education master theses in TEPS in the long term.
In 2025, two postdoctoral fellows were hired to assist in further advancing the TEPS project, particularly with regard to the development and piloting of questionnaires.
The way forward
TEPS will apply for research funding from the Research Council of Norway (NFR) in 2025. In preparation of the application, a framework outlining the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the project is being developed. In addition, we are working to recruit more partners for the project.
The next project phase (2025–2028) therefore aims to demonstrate the feasibility of TEPS through additional pilots across several teacher education institutions and to further develop the project.
