Current Projects

The education system in Austria (as well as several other education systems in other countries) is facing challenges due to a significant shortage of teachers. Opinions about reasons for this shortage as well as what measures should be taken are diverse. In our project "Studium & Schule", we are investigating the mechanisms underlying the widespread measure of early teaching of student teachers independent of their studies (early entry) in order to develop future solutions to the challenges.

A first study is divided into several phases. After the development of a comprehensive questionnaire for students, with and without study-related teaching activities, this was used to collect data from 1643 prospective teachers at several locations at universities and teacher training colleges in Austria and Germany. With the quantitative study, we include relevant topics such as theory-practice interlocking, well-being or deployment in schools to describe an understanding of the professional life and learning process of future teachers. With this study, we investigate how student teachers make decisions about their future career as a teacher, conditional factors for early career entry, deployment in schools and how this decision affects their studies. Regarding the assignment in schools, we focus on the one hand on the workload and support in schools, and on the other hand on the self-image as a prospective teacher.

This first study contributes to identifying the effects of an all-encompassing measure against the shortage of teachers in Austria and to initiating further research activities on this highly virulent topic of educational policy. The focus is on the effects in schools as well as on the teacher training programme.