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Teacher Student Assessment Austria (TESAT)Concept, characteristics, and first findings Abstract Successful school education is not only based on students' aptitude but also on their teachers' behavior and therefore their cognitive and non-cognitive predispositions, thus making the selection of appropriate candidates for this job critical. Apart from attraction-strategies and a good system for teacher education eligible candidates can be recruited by means of selection and self-selection. This paper presents a new, scientifically developed selection tool for teacher education, consisting of three modules. This new selection tool is used for student selection at 20 university-level institutions in Austria. It consists of (1) a self-selection tool, which is only used for this purpose and not for assessment and which deals with motivational and personalitybased traits relevant for the job of a teacher and gives information to the candidates about the requirements of the career. (2) a standardized computer-based test battery, assessing cognitive, linguistic, emotional, creativity-and personality-related traits. (3) a face-to-face-assessment which is a strictly standardized interview with a duration of approximately 10 min. In this interview, further qualities relevant for becoming a teacher are assessed: verbal and non-verbal communication skills, motivational variables or the ability of self-reflection. Further studies and evaluations encompass a longitudinal view on teacher personality and validations based on real-life criteria from the teacher-life. First results on prognostic validity for academic success are reported.

This article introduces a new scale for the assessment of Appreciation for Creative Personality (ACP). The ACP scale is a brief 13-item forced-choice measure that assesses interindividual differences in the preference for interacting with creative people. ACP is considered an important factor of creative climate at the level of interpersonal interaction. Individuals who score high on ACP are thought to foster a creative climate in that they value creative traits in others. In two studies, the psychometric characteristics of the ACP scale were probed. The scale showed a clear unidimensional structure with evidence of good reliability and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. The ACP was substantially related to Big Five openness to experience, but predicted relevant criteria over and above openness, supporting the conceptual distinction between ACP and openness. In dyadic data analyses, participants' openness to experience was significantly associated with their parents' ACP, which shows that the ACP scale captured shared interpersonal variance. Moreover, parental ACP indirectly predicted participants' everyday creative activities via the path of openness. These findings suggest that the ACP scale is a useful tool for the study of social-environmental climate for creativity from an interpersonal perspective.

The bandwidth-fidelity dilemma is a controversially discussed problem in personality measurement. In this study, we contrasted the utility of broad versus narrow personality traits in an admission exam for teacher students. We compared the Big Five and narrow personality constructs (social-communicative behavior, achievement behavior, health and recreation behavior), which were part of an assessment battery for teacher student selection (N = 1120), regarding overlap and predictive validity. As criterion variables, academic satisfaction (N = 184) and GPA (N = 680) were assessed later. Reasonableness of including both questionnaires in one assessment may be questioned in terms of overlap of the personality inventories. Results show that health and recreation behavior cannot be covered by the Big Five in a selection procedure. Empirically, both broad and narrow traits show predictive validity for academic success and satisfaction.

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