Profiles of pre-service teachers’ personality traits and cognitive abilities: Relations with graduation and teacher self-efficacy

Motivation to teach and preparedness for teaching among preservice teachers in China: The effect of conscientiousness and constructivist teaching beliefs

“…The OECD (2005) advised that there is a need to better understand the factors of PSTs' educational success and entry into the profession. Studies on the pre-entry characteristics of PSTs identified that motivation, personality, and beliefs are predictive of their engagement and learning (e.g., Ravindran et al, 2005;Kim and Cho, 2014;Franz et al, 2022). Personality shapes individuals' determination to pursue a particular career, cognitive capacity development, and educational attainment (Kankaraš, 2017) studies (e.g., Thornton et al, 2005;Eryilmaz, 2014) have also proven that a mature personality is key to the overall quality of preservice teachers and is also the core quality of teaching.…”

“…A large number of studies have highlighted the importance of the relationship between PSTs’ personality traits and their performance, self-efficacy, and willingness to keep teaching. For example, a study by Franz et al (2022) indicated that extraversion and neuroticism were crucial personality traits as PSTs seem to be rather homogeneous in terms of the other traits. Meanwhile, other studies have explored PSTs’ performance by connecting their cognitive abilities with different personality traits.…”

Pre-service teachers’ altruistic motivation for choosing teaching as a career: where does it come from?

“…The attraction to teaching also relates to the Chinese cultural context. Pre-service teachers' occupational preference is affected not only by their individual inclination but also by regarding teaching as a family career (Hong et al, 2018;Duan, 2021). The realistic element should become an indispensable element to dig into for its explanatory power in clarifying the formation and development of altruistic motivation.…”

“…Sometimes, family culture or family tradition impacts undergraduates’ career choices when it comes to the family’s opinion that teaching is a novel and stable career ( Li, 2021 ; Zhang, 2022 ), which can be viewed as a kind of altruistic motivation to satisfy certain family needs. Another realistic theme would be occupational preferences based on various personal traits ( Franz et al, 2022 ). Occupational preferences, under the influence of one’s personality or self-perception ( Watt and Richardson, 2007 ), might be a vital element for inclining to certain feature careers.…”

“…Apart from social-cognitive and emotional elements, both family factors and personal occupational preference are reflected in realistic terms in the process of forming altruistic motivation in pre-service teachers. The realistic element particularly reflects local Chinese collectivist culture (Duan, 2021), in which individuals' decisions and behaviors are highly impacted by subjective norms, such as family members, relatives, friends, etc. Real-world situations, such as pre-service teachers' surroundings and occupational preferences, would also need to be taken into account for developing altruistic motivation.…”