TEPS: The Teacher Education Panel Study
What is TEPS?
TEPS is an ongoing project to establish a research infrastructure for teacher education in Norway. The project is building a new, systematic, and longitudinal database that will eventually be operated as a national infrastructure.
Purpose
The main objective of the TEPS project is to establish a national research infrastructure that enables and stimulates high-quality research on teacher education and the transition to working life. To achieve this goal, the project will facilitate the reuse of the database for qualified users and partners, both nationally and internationally.
Data
The TEPS database will contain comprehensive and systematic data on teacher education and the transition to the teaching profession.
Longitudinal data will be collected by following teacher students from the start of their studies and into their transition to working life. By following new cohorts each year, TEPS will also provide panel data. Thus, TEPS data will enable the analyses of developments over time and comparisons between cohorts. TEPS will also collect data from as many teacher education institutions as possible, making it possible to make comparisons between institutions. Such comprehensive, high-quality, data can help answer many different research questions, such as:
- Which parts of teacher education can be improved according to teacher students and teacher educators?
- To what extent do teacher education institutions differ from each other in how they organize and implement teacher education?
- How can teacher students best be prepared for the transition to professional life in order to prevent practice shock?
In the long run, the TEPS database will combine the data from multiple data sources and points in time. The data will be archived at Sikt, and researchers can then apply for access to the material for their own research purposes.
Impact
Data collected through TEPS, and the research based on this data, can help improve teacher education, further develop study programs, and provide a better knowledge base for policy making. Thus, the TEPS database will improve the quality of teacher education and strengthen the transition to the teaching profession, thereby better equiping teacher students for the profession.
In addition, the establishment of a national research infrastructure for teacher education is the first of its kind in Norway and one of the most comprehensive internationally. Therefore, it will contribute to developing and strengthening the field of research both nationally and globally. Moreover, the database is being developed in collaboration with most Norwegian teacher education institutions, which will also strengthen inter-institutional research collaboration and further develop the field.
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 April 2025, two postdoctoral fellows, Liva Jenny Martinussen and Bas Senden, were hired to contribute to the further development of the TEPS project, with a focus on developing and testing questionnaires.
In September 2025, TEPS held an NFR application writing workshop with representatives from 17 Norwegian institutions to lay the foundation for a joint application for a national research infrastructure for teacher education.
In October 2025, the TEPS framework was published in OsloMet’s journal series. The framework document lays the foundation for further work on establishing the research infrastructure.
In November 2025, the TEPS project submitted a comprehensive application to the Research Council of Norway’s call for funding for research infrastructure of national importance.
Way forward
TEPS will continue to develop and operationalize the key constructs that will be included in TEPS. The next project phase (2026–2028) therefore aims to demonstrate the feasibility of TEPS through additional pilots across several teacher education institutions and to further develop the project.