Online self-assessments (OSA) for study orientation have experienced an enormous boom in the field of higher education. Various OSAs have been recently developed. In teacher education programmes OSAs are mostly voluntary, optional for those who are interested in reflecting on their suitability and aptitude for a teacher education degree. At some universities in Austria or Germany, they are compulsory by now (for example at the University of Hamburg, University of Vienna).

However, the measures that actually should be used to determine and assess this suitability and aptitude remain largely unclear, not least because they go hand-in-hand with the still unresolved matters of what constitutes a good teacher and what competences he/she might need (see Darling-Hammond 2000, Oser/Oelkers 2001, Terhart 2007). Although the discussion on appropriate criteria for determining suitability and aptitude is by no means yet concluded, many OSAs include those aspects upon which experts largely agree: cognitive abilities, motivation, values and convictions (see Baumert/Kunter 2006, Blömeke/Kaiser/Lehmann 2008).

Subject-specific aspects related to the teaching subjects have not yet been considered in OSAs. However, it is known from studies that content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of teachers have important effects on the quality of the teaching and the pupils' performance and they correlate with each other (see Hill/Rowan/Ball 2005, Baumert et al. 2010). The three dimensions of the cognitive professional competence of future teachers (content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge) is a known differentiation in international discourses (see Schulman 1987, Bromme 2001, Weinert 2001) and in the traditional structure of teacher education programmes (subject matter, subject education and educational foundation).

In this presentation, I will focus on the questions of how these findings can be considered in OSAs and how tools integrating subject-specific questionnaires can be developed. Within this context the conceptualisation of the OSA for teacher education at the University of Vienna with its subject-specific module will be discussed.

The University of Vienna has developed a self-assessment tool (see Schrittesser 2014, Neunteufl/Bugelnig 2016). In addition to modules on pedagogic and didactic interests, degree-specific expectations, personality, cognitive abilities and case vignettes the OSA contains subject-specific interests and competences. This module offers prospective students the opportunity to complete questionnaires for all the 27 teaching subjects offered in the University of Vienna’s teacher education programme.

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