Abstract

The attitudes towards the teaching profession reflect teachers’ perception of the profession and strongly shape their professional behavior. As understanding the teaching profession and developing positive attitudes requires a long process, it is important to determine factors affecting attitudes towards teaching profession before the students engage in actual work behavior. Therefore, this study aims to determine the predictive power of career adaptability and academic motivation on student teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching profession. The study was carried out through convergent parallel mixed methods design. 251 student teachers participated in the quantitative part of the study. For the qualitative part, five voluntary students attended the focus group interview. Quantitative data were collected with three scales while the qualitative data were collected through a focus group interview. The quantitative data were analyzed through stepwise multiple regression analysis and the qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. Quantitative findings indicated that career adaptability and academic motivation predicted the attitudes towards the teaching profession, significantly. Correspondingly, the qualitative data also gave parallel results with the quantitative data, indicating that students’ adaptation to career and their academic motivation were important predictors of their attitudes towards the teaching profession. 

Keywords

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