DOI: 10.3886/e178441v1
title: The right job pays

description: Teacher shortages are a significant concern in many countries. Hiring pre-service teachers seems a promising strategy to alleviate this problem while providing students an opportunity to develop relevant skills in a real-work context. However, being employed alongside full-time studying might compete with attendance or self-study and, thereby, hinder study progress. This study analyzed the effect of student employment on study progress of 132 pre-service teachers (repeated measures n = 3,245). Employment hours, remuneration (getting paid), domain-relevance, and timing (year of college) were taken into account. Multilevel growth analyses showed that students who spent more time on a paid teaching job in year 3 or 4 obtained significantly more study credits compared to those who did not get paid or got paid for a job outside of education. Overall, student employment did not relate to less study progress and depending on domain-relevance, timing and remuneration, the effect can even be positive.
description: Response Rates: 40%
description: Presence of Common Scales: The university at which the study took place records the study progress of students in a ‘data warehouse’. Students received European ‘study credits’ for the courses that they finish. Each year’s program contains 60 study credits, and 240 credits are needed to obtain a teaching degree. Each time a student receives new study credits, the new total amount of credits is recorded together with the associated date. The university information department provided us a dataset that included data about enrolment, gender, previous education, and the records of cumulatively obtained study credit at 25 repeatedly measured moments. Additionally, a survey asked students whether they have received paid employment outside or within the field of education and whether they have completed an internship during the past eight semesters. Subsequently, they filled in how much time they spent on average per week on different types of jobs and unpaid internship overtime during the past eight semesters, resulting in eight repeatedly measured indicators for hours spent on jobs and overtime. Because internships are integrated into the curriculum of the study programs, we specifically asked how much extra time – i.e., more time than required by the study program - they spent on unpaid internships within education. Paid work in education was also clearly separated from paid internships that were part of the curriculum. This allowed us to study the effects of both unpaid work in education and paid work in- and outside of education as separated from the study program on the accumulation of study credits.
description: The studied cohort consisted of 330 pre-service teachers from 13 four-year Bachelor (undergraduate) study programs within a faculty of education at a Dutch university of applied sciences. All pre-service teachers who started a full-time teacher education study in 2016 and still attended university in 2020 received an email with a link to an online survey at the end of their fourth year. The email stated the purpose of the study and the key elements of the data management plan. Students who accepted the online informed-consent statement were directed to the survey. All students who finished the survey received €10 for their effort. 189 students started the survey, and 142 students completed the survey. After data cleaning, 10 students who had interrupted their study and therefore had incomplete data were removed, and 132 students were used in the final dataset.<br><br>Within the chosen cohort, 36% of the pre-service teachers were male. In the Netherlands, students from different types of previous education are admissible to teacher education at a university of applied science. Most of the respondents followed ‘higher general secondary education’ (54%), followed by students from a vocational track (27%), and students who followed an academic track (19%) prior to becoming a pre-service teacher. These percentages correspond nearly precisely with the dispersion among previous education in the sample and are similar to national averages. The students in the sample followed 13 different teacher education courses (Elementary school, Dutch, English, French, German, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Economics, Business Administration, Sociology, Geology, and History). <br>
description: Smallest Geographic Unit: Teacher Education students enrolled at a Dutch university of Applied Sciences