Survey data on the perceived transferability of initial teacher education among 229 Tunisian physical education teachers

This dataset contains the responses of 229 in-service physical education (PE) teachers in Tunisia to a 14-item questionnaire on the perceived transferability of their initial teacher education to daily professional practice, together with the questionnaire itself and the code needed to reproduce all published analyses. Instrument. The questionnaire was developed for this study in three phases: item generation from the literature on initial PE teacher training, transfer of training to practice, and self-directed professional development; content validation by a panel of nine experts in PE didactics; and an independent pilot study (n = 107, not included here) assessing item quality, internal consistency and 30-day test–retest stability. The 14 statements are grouped into three thematic blocks — transferability of disciplinary knowledge (4 items), field pedagogy and the shock of praxis (5 items), and perceived insufficiency, experience and self-training (5 items) — and are answered on a five-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Seven statements are worded in the direction of insufficiency and are reverse-scored when aggregated. The instrument was administered in French, the language of instruction in Tunisian schools; the full French wordings and English translations are provided. Collection. Administered online via Google Forms between 5 June and 5 August 2026, distributed through regional PE inspectors and social media groups of Tunisian PE teachers. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, preceded by an explicit consent item. Recruitment was non-probabilistic, so no response rate can be computed. There are no missing values. Contents. The coded dataset in XLSX and CSV (229 cases × 19 variables: identifier, sex, age, years of experience, years since graduation, and the 14 statements); a codebook documenting variable coding, derived variables and data-quality issues; the bilingual questionnaire; and a documented Python script reproducing every statistic and figure reported in the associated article. Anonymity. No nominative data were collected at any stage. Institution of graduation, teaching cycle, governorate of practice and school setting were recorded but are omitted from this deposit to reduce re-identification risk, as several governorates had a single respondent. Their aggregate distributions appear in the article; the variables are available from the corresponding author for replication purposes. Known issues. Fourteen respondents (6.1%) reported years of experience and years since graduation that cannot both be correct, most likely drop-down entry slips. These cases are flagged by the analysis script and excluded in sensitivity analyses. Age, experience and years since graduation are intercorrelated at r = .87 to .94 and should not be entered into the same regression model.