The ESBW Short Scale

Abstract: Teacher students’ professional educational knowledge is of great importance in academic teacher education. In response to the need to continuously optimize and improve teacher education, we developed a standards-based test instrument designed along the Standards of Teacher Education of the German education administration. The so-called ESBW (Essen Test for the Assessment of Standards-Based Educational Knowledge) is intended to assess educational knowledge as it is defined in these standards. This Brief Report aims to investigate whether the ESBW, as an exclusively standards-based developed test, can empirically be distinguished from a similar, but non-originally standards-based developed test, here the BilWiss 2.0 test, which also partially covers the standards. Competing structural equation models based on a study with 216 teacher students revealed that the ESBW short scale can be empirically distinguished from the BilWiss 2.0 short version, indicating that both instruments partly measure different aspects of educational knowledge. In addition, the examination of measurement invariance revealed that the ESBW performed similarly well for both beginning and advanced teacher students. Thus, our results further underline the usefulness of the ESBW for the assessment and evaluation of the German Standards of Teacher Education.