Education & Social Work

FIT-Choice Project within the BScE: Factors Influencing Teaching Choice in Luxembourg

Institute for Lifelong Learning and Guidance
In Luxembourg’s multilingual school system, which serves a highly diverse student population, the fundamental school teacher can best be described as a “Generalist”. Consequently, the admissions process aims to identify and select qualified candidates for training into the teaching profession at the fundamental school level (pre-school and primary school levels), including the preparation track in general secondary school and special needs education.

Experimental research to better understand factors that influence BScE candidates to become a teacher.

A recent report by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2016) sought to estimate the demand, or number of teachers needed, around the world to reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 that aims to support inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities globally. The report estimated that 24.4 million primary school teachers and another 44.4 million secondary school teachers are required to provide every child in the world access to education. This phenomenon of widespread teacher shortages around the world has led researchers to further investigate what motivates candidates to become teachers and what motivates them to remain in the job (see for example Watt et al., 2012). Likewise, for Luxembourg, this is a very important issue and thus, through this research we seek to address it.

As the BScE programme focusses on pedagogical, didactical, methodological skill development, all candidates must have sufficient content knowledge in the main subjects they will teach, meaning mathematics, sciences, French, German and Luxembourgish language. Consequently, the admission test format, up until 2019 (pre-COVID-19), emphasized text reading comprehension in French, German, Luxembourgish, and English; as well as grammatical knowledge in French and German, and content knowledge in mathematics and basic fundamental science. In 2020, because of COVID-19, the process was altered to include school grades, a motivation letter, and an online questionnaire about the candidate’s motivations for becoming a teacher (Watt and Richardson, 2007). Moreover, prior to the exam, the candidate is invited to respond to a host of noncognitive scales and socio-demographic indicators as part of the registration process.

Akin to the researchers involved in the FIT-Choice project (http://www.fitchoice.org/), our team seeks to address the problems of recruitment and retention for the current teacher shortage in the Luxembourgish context. Furthermore, we aim to identify motivation profiles for early career choice as part of the BScE Admissions process, as well as to document and analyse changes in perceived competencies, professional commitment, and programme dropouts during the four years of the training programme.

UL members

  • Débora Poncelet, Institute for Lifelong Learning and Guidance
  • Salvador Rivas, LUCET
  • Gilbert Busana, Institute for Teaching and Learning
  • Alain Reeff, Bureau Temps de Terrain