Teachers in all educational contexts play a key role for successful learning in addition to and in interaction with other factors such as learner characteristics (e.g. Hattie 2009). However, there is still a lack of empirically sound facts about teachers’ knowledge and competences providing the ground for truly professional (i.e. not layperson) performance. One model of teachers’ professional competence that has become prominent in educational science is the COACTIV-model (Kunter et al., 2013). It contains several dimensions of teachers’ professional competence: teachers’ professional knowledge, professional beliefs, motivational orientations and professional self-regulation. Professional knowledge, in turn, is subdivided into teachers’ content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and, inter alia, pedagogical-psychological knowledge (PPK); while CK and PCK are conceptualised as domain specific, a supposedly non-domain specific aspect of this teacher competence is PPK: It is conceptualised as general knowledge for teachers of all educational contexts. PPK is defined as the knowledge needed to create and optimise situations of learning and instruction, including declarative and procedural generic knowledge of effective teaching that is potentially applicable in a wide variety of subjects (Voss, Kunter, & Baumert, 2011).

Whereas instruments to assess (parts of) teachers’ PPK exist for the school context (e.g. Beck et al., 2008; König, Blömeke, Paine, Schmidt, & Hsieh, 2011), an objective, reliable, valid and empirically evident test is not available yet that can also assess adult education teachers’ knowledge and competence; there are only instruments for self-assessment and / or external assessment of adult educators’ knowledge and competences based on rating scales estimating the amount and the quality of a given capacity (e.g. Vinepac-Project, 2008). Further, there is no instrument to empirically examine the hypothesised generality of PPK, i.e. that PPK is not specific for educational contexts such as school and adult education and is generic for different content domains and subjects like math or English as a foreign language. Nevertheless, there are similarities between the different educational contexts mentioned above supporting the hypothesised generality of PPK: Adult education teachers and school teachers, for example, both deal with situations of learning and instruction in which the heterogeneity of learners has to be taken into account, appropriate teaching methods have to be applied, learners should be motivated, group dynamics managed, feedback given, etc. In addition, most existing teacher knowledge tests emphasise the declarative, not the procedural aspects of PPK.

To fill the named research gaps the authors develop an objective, reliable and valid test instrument to asses PPK and its hypothesised generality using videos as item stimulus material as well as text-based stimuli in an online test environment. According to Lievens, Peeters and Schollaert (2008), video-based tests generally have a higher fidelity than text-based tests. Video-based tests can mediate more complexity and non-directional information, thus, reality can be better depicted than in text-based tests. Against the backdrop that course- and classroom situations are usually complex and a lot of information is lost or emphasised by (not) mentioning it in text-based test material, video-based stimuli seem to be the mean of choice. Another reason for using video-based stimuli is that courses of action in which procedural knowledge is relevant can be conveyed and tested better by means of video than text-based. However, because of test length and test economy, text-based items will also be part of the project’s test under preparation.

Three research questions are investigated in the course of the test development: Firstly, how can PPK be conceptualised? Secondly, how can it be measured in a valid and reliable way? And thirdly, how generic is PPK in different educational contexts and subjects?

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