The Brazilian National Student Performance Exam (ENADE) is part of the National Higher Education Evaluation System and is composed of a test, a questionnaire evaluating the test, a questionnaire to be answered by the coordinators and a socio-economic questionnaire with 114 questions. The present study was elaborated from the analysis of this material and of the data from the Higher Education Census, with the purpose of analyzing the profile of the students of the teacher training programs that took the 2005 ENADE, their performance in the General Education portion of the test and the reasons they point out for choosing their programs. The study also tries to establish the relations between some selected variables in attempts to verify the significant differences. The results show that the students of the teacher training programs are concentrated in night classes of private higher education institutions and come mainly from public high schools. The main reason for their choice is the desire to become a teacher. In what concerns performance, the best results among freshmen as well as seniors, are in Physics (objective questions) and Geography (essay questions). The lowest mean of freshmen and seniors per area of knowledge is Pedagogy and the highest is Geography.
Higher Education Evaluation; Large scale assessment; ENADE; Teacher Training; Teacher Education
