Who becomes a teacher and why?

Abstract

This paper reports on a comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesising the findings of some of the strongest empirical work on the main factors influencing people's decisions to be teachers or not. Four search engines, including Google and Google Scholar and five electronic databases identified 517 studies of which 212 were included in this narrative synthesis. These studies highlighted three main motivating factors: intrinsic, altruistic and extrinsic, although the order of the ranking varies with subjects, phase of education and gender of teachers. In general, these studies reported that women are more likely to report being motivated by intrinsic and altruistic reasons, while men are more likely to cite extrinsic reasons. Across all cultures, men are reported to be more strongly influenced by social norms and expectations and were less likely to choose primary and early years teaching. Women are also more likely to experience higher levels of career satisfaction and less social dissuasion than men. Research on motivation to teach is also often focused only on those who have already made the decision to teach. Therefore, policies based on these studies might only be attracting those who are already persuaded. This paper argues that to improve recruitment of under-represented groups (e.g., males and STEM subject graduates), attention should instead be on those who might otherwise have gone into teaching, but have not. For this group, the review found that it is the status of the profession, the working environment and salary over the long term that are important.

The impact of ‘bursary tourism’ or the desire for a ‘fulfilling, challenging, and emotionally rewarding career’? Career entry motivations and perceptions of preservice teachers from England

“…However, the meta‐analysis of reliability generalisation of the FIT‐Choice scale by Navarro‐Asencio et al (2021) draws the attention of researchers to the context‐specific interpretation and meaning of different constructs in the scale and the potential delimitation of quantitative instruments in terms of concealing cultural differences. Acknowledging the minor amendments introduced to the scale in different countries, as reported by different researchers, and attending to the concerns raised by some researchers regarding the ‘uncritical use of FIT‐Choice instrument’ (See et al, 2022, p. 20), we tested the scale validity and reliability, confirming the FIT‐Choice scale factor structure for both motivations and perceptions in the context of the study, although it was a small sample. With the motivation scales, we excluded the subscale ‘job transferability’ due to low reliability; and item B7 was excluded to improve the reliability of the scale ‘ intrinsic career value’ (consistent with Watt et al, 2012).…”

“…Use of an open-ended question helped to get a deeper understanding of their career intentions, adding authenticity to the quantitative data. There are criticisms on the use of the FIT-Choice scale without considering the background characteristics of participants (e.g., See et al, 2022), analysing the influence of sociological factors on their motivations. Hence, the second stage involved multivariate analysis testing the differences in motivations and perceptions among the participants.…”

Exploring the experiences of undergraduate physics students taking a “Teaching Physics in School” module and the effects on their intentions to become a secondary physics teacher

“…To put these numbers in context, in the same academic year in England a total of 5,620 students graduated from physics and astronomy degrees [3] making the target for physics teacher recruitment an unrealistic 46% of the total, but the actual number recruited a disappointing 7%. Similar shortages of physics and STEM teachers have been reported around the world [4] suggesting that it is important to fully understand ways of introducing secondary teaching as a career possibility for physics undergraduate students.…”

Judging the relative trustworthiness of research results: How to do it and why it matters

“…The standard of evidence looked for must be at least as strong as reviewers would accept for established 'facts' in real life. The sieve has now been used widely and formally by research teams to assist in their reviews of evidence since 2014(e.g., El Soufi & See, 2019Fan & See, 2022;Huang & Chalmers, 2023;Neelen & Kirschner, 2020;Owen et al, 2022;See et al, 2022;Siddiqui & Ventista, 2018), as well as by countless PhD students in their theses. It has been explained in videos for specific areas like evidence on second language learning (Chalmers, 2016), and discussed widely on social media in fields beyond education and social science (e.g., https:// twitt er.…”