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Student teachers with strong intrinsic career choice motivations show higher levels of satisfaction and academic achievement. Previous research on teaching profession-specific career choice fails to answer two questions that are relevant to recruiting future teacher candidates: First, without the use of a control group or a student sample, it is not clear whether the captured career choice motivations are relevant for students' teaching-specific career choices. Second, no instrument exists to determine students' career choice motivations towards the teaching profession. Therefore, the questionnaire for the assessment of motivation for the choice of teacher studies (FEMOLA; Pohlmann & Möller, 2010), an established instrument in German-speaking countries, was adapted and subjected to empirical testing in three samples of N = 215, N = 278, and N = 350 students. The structure of the newly developed FEMOLA-S maps components of intrinsic (pedagogical interest and interest in knowledge transfer) and extrinsic career choice motivations (social influences, utility, low difficulty of studying), which show a good fit to the collected data. Intrinsic career choice motivation, in contrast to extrinsic career choice motivation, allowed for the prediction of students' teaching-specific career choice intention, even beyond Holland's (1997) occupational interest types that are frequently used in career choice research. Possible fields of application of the developed questionnaire and the implications of the results for the effective recruitment of suitable student teachers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]