Teacher educators, administrators, policy-makers, and novice and advanced teacher candidates can achieve educational success and advance high-quality teacher preparation programmes. To do this, they must identify and cultivate positive dispositions for professional competence, commitment, and success in teaching children and adolescents. Therefore, a reliable and refined teacher candidate disposition assessment system should be created with a clear sense of critical underlying issues, including an acknowledgement that these issues related to candidate dispositions are not singularly about empirical data. This article presents a research project at an urban American university that focuses on extending earlier researchers' work in establishing a research-based disposition assessment system for teacher education programmes. The project conducted a quantitative and qualitative analyses of existing measures and disposition constructs, reviews of research on dispositions, and the modification, development, and validation of disposition measures across teacher education programmes. Findings from this research have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of dispositional factors in teacher candidates associated with teacher quality issues and student outcomes. The researchers anticipate that this examination of dispositions will promote discussions among teacher educators globally about notions of measuring, predicting, and cultivating constructive dispositions to help enable future and advanced teachers practice as competent twenty-first century professionals.