The Panel of Teacher Education Students is an additional study to the Starting Cohort 5 "Students" of the National Education Panel Study (NEPS), which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in cooperation with the German Center for Research on Higher Education and Science (DZHW).
As part of the NEPS, a panel study was started in 2010 to follow a cohort of first-year students from the winter semester of 2010/2011 through their studies and into their careers (NEPS Starting Cohort 5). Students in teacher training programs were disproportionately considered in the sampling; approximately 5,500 student teachers participated in the first wave of the survey. The total sample covers all types of higher education institutions and disciplines nationwide, and the teacher trainee sample is also representative of the whole of Germany.
In 2014, with the launch of the first project phase of the Panel of Teacher Education Students (LAP I), it became possible to supplement the survey program with constructs that are central to research on teacher education. The continuation of the special sample of student teachers and the addition of teacher education-specific survey content to this study (see Procedure and Methods) make it possible to address the research questions listed above and others.
Due to the longitudinal approach, which accompanies student teachers from the beginning of their studies into their professional careers and which also addresses the life course before the beginning of their studies through retrospective data, the project considerably improves the data situation on teacher education. The database obtained is made available to the national and international scientific community by the LIfBi Research Data Center.