Antecedents of teachers’ professional competencies

Abstract

Non-behavioral factors potentially enhance the development of teachers’ professional competencies. Because there is a lack of research examining the direct relationships between teachers’ professional competencies and these non-behavioral factors, present study aimed to identify the main cognitive, personality and motivational antecedents of professional competencies among Slovak in-service teachers. The relationships between professional competencies, cognitive abilities (including executive functions, cognitive reflection and scientific reasoning), personality and motivation were measured in order to identify the main antecedents of teachers’ professional competencies. A total of 443 in-service teachers (88.7% women) aged 21–70 years old with 0 to 50 years of practice participated in the data collection. The main positive antecedents of professional competencies were having personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness and open-mindedness, having intrinsic and altruistic motivation and having developed executive function plans and time management. The main negative antecedent of professional competencies was the personality trait negative emotionality. It follows that these non-behavioral factors should be considered in the selection of student applicants and that more should be done to develop cognitive abilities during teacher training, including social psychological training.

Keywords:

• professional competency
• teacher
• motivation
• personality
• cognition
• executive function

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

The study was supported by the scientific grant agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic as part of the project VEGA 1/0084/21 “Personality, Cognitive and Motivational Predictors of Professional Competencies of Teachers in Pregradual Education and in Practice”.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All methods were carried out in accordance with APA standards. Informed consent was obtained from all subjects.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated for this study can be found at: https://osf.io/p2ekq.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2286813

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vedecká Grantová Agentúra MŠVVaŠ SR a SAV [VEGA 1/0084/21].