Motivations to enter teaching: an investigation with non-education university students

ABSTRACT

Teachers are motivated by extrinsic, intrinsic, and altruistic values, but little is known about what might convince other students to become educators. Conducted in two stages, the present study uses a survey to show education majors and non-education majors have different impressions of how careers in education satisfy intrinsic, extrinsic, and altruistic motivations. Then, a randomized experiment shows that prompts concerning extrinsic, intrinsic, and altruistic values increased the interest in teaching among non-education majors. But important differences appeared along lines of gender and academic achievement. Female participants responded positively to intrinsic values but males responded to extrinsic values. High achieving students responded more to altruistic prompts.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• motivations to teach
• supply of teachers
• teacher quality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Cherie Maestas of Purdue University and the POLS Lab at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for their help in executing the experiment used in this study. I would also like to thank Drs. Erik Byker, Hilary Dack, Samuel Grubbs, and Mary Jo McGowan for their help in gathering survey data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.