In Austria, national educational standards in science education will be implemented (Lucyshyn, 2006) to promote competency-oriented teaching and learning in the lower secondary level. To facilitate the implementation the four-years-lasting Austrian-wide research project biokomp (Teaching and Learning Biology to foster Competencies; see http://www.doriselster.at/biokomp) will be conducted aiming at identifying conditional variables at the teaching-staff level which may promote or impede the implementation of competency-oriented teaching. Therefore, a questionnaire-based survey is carried out to yield an understanding of both student teachers’ and in-career teachers´ attitudes towards and preparedness for the implementation of an instructional design aimed at promoting learners’ competencies (according to Weinert, 2001). The result of the initial part of the biokomp project including data of the student teacher survey will be reported at ECER 2009. The questionnaire survey allows to classify student teachers and in-career teachers of biology in accordance with an empirically founded typology (Kluge, 1999) with special attention being paid to the teachers’ epistemological skills and attitudes towards the competency areas ‘subject knowledge’, ‘knowledge acquisition’, ‘subject related communication’ and ‘valuing and moral judgement’ as defined by the German National Educational Standards (KMK [Conference of the Ministers of Education of the German Districts] 2004). These characteristics are related to teachers´ personality traits (Mayr & Neuweg, 2005; (McCrae & Costa 1999) and their self-concepts of teaching and learning (Elster, 2007), as well as their readiness to participate in Learning Communities (Brown, 1997) as a measure directed at the advancement of teacher professionalism. The distribution of these types is examined against the background of a number of socio-demographic data, such as age, gender, teaching experience and subsidiary subject.

To investigate the process, in the initial part of the project, a student teacher questionnaire was conducted at Vienna University (117 items; N = 360). The data was analyzed in SPSS using factor analysis and cluster analysis. Additionally, interviews with student teachers (N = 3) were conducted to validate the data.

The results introduced seven attitude dimensions that seem to be useful to classify biology teacher students. Based on these seven dimensions four types of biology teacher students are interpretable: the pedagogical-innovative type, the subject-innovative type, the subject-conventional type and the process-oriented type. At this time the analysis is not completed, further results will be presented at ECER 2009. Based on the results of the student teacher survey the in-career teacher questionnaire –as the tool of the main survey - will be modified and accomplished Austrian-wide in 2009.