In this presentation we introduce the Norwegian Teacher Education Panel Study (TEPS), a scientific, systematic, and longitudinal database as a national research infrastructure for teacher education in Norway. The presentation addresses the pressing need for such an infrastructure, elaborates on the development and design, and presents the current status of TEPS. High-quality teacher education is critical for sustaining a teaching profession capable of responding to increasingly complex educational challenges, while also supporting recruitment and retention of students over time. At the same time, many countries, including Norway, face persistent teacher shortages, declining application rates to teacher education programmes, and increasingly demanding classrooms realities (UNESCO, 2024; Utdanningsforbundet, 2024; White et al., 2025). Addressing these challenges requires a strong empirical knowledge base. However, most existing research on teacher education has been small-scale, fragmented, and predominantly qualitative, limiting cumulative knowledge building and the capacity to inform policy and practice (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015; Forsström & Munthe, 2023; Livingston & Flores, 2017). In response to the urgent need to advance the state-of-the-art in teacher education research, the TEPS is in the process of establishing a comprehensive scientific database to enable and stimulate high-quality educational research on teacher education and the transition into working life in Norway. TEPS aims to follow student teachers from entry into five-year integrated master’s programmes through their transition into working life, employing a longitudinal, multi-level, and multi-cohort design. The infrastructure integrates multiple data sources, including questionnaires, register data, and text-based materials. The use of already available data, where possible, is intended to reduce participant burden. Through this design, TEPS aims to provide a research database allowing strong inferences, including causal ones, which in turn enables evidence-based policy and practice through high-quality research. Recently, a framework providing the foundation for the ongoing development and piloting of TEPS has been developed (see Martinussen et al., 2025). In August 2026, the instruments will be piloted, after which TEPS will enter its operational phase with data collection covering the full target population. In line with open science principles, the database will be made available to the research community through digital infrastructure provided by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (SIKT). In doing so, researchers, both from Norway and abroad, can utilize the database to conduct high-quality teacher education research also enabling cross-national collaborations.

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