AN INVESTIGATION OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS TEACHING PROFESSION IN REGARD TO SOME VARIABLES: THE CASE OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the pre-service teachers' attitudes towardsteaching profession and explore the effects of the certain variables (gender, GPA, age,department, motives for selecting teaching profession, and the level of mother and fathereducation) on their attitudes. The participants of the study consisted of 344 undergraduatestudents, (282 females and 62 males) from five different departments at the faculty of educationat Middle East Technical University during the fall semester of the 2015-2016 educationalyear. As a means of data collection, the "Attitude Measurement Scale for Teaching Profession"developed by Üstüner (2006) was applied. The scale was a one-dimensional 5-Likert typeranging from “strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree (5)” with 34 items. For the analysis ofthe data, Independent-Samples t-test and One-Way-ANOVA were used. According to thefindings obtained from the study, while the attitudes of pre-service teachers towards theteaching profession showed a significant difference regarding gender, GPA, department, andmotives for selecting the teaching profession, it did not show any significant difference for ageand the level of mother and father education.