1 Measuring Student Teachers ’ Attitudes Towards Teaching

One important variable put under investigation in a longitudinal study of teacher preparation and professional development (Pre-service to beginning teacher), is their attitude towards teaching. Attitudes can be measured. What is needed is the construction of the variable and the location of the individuals concerned on the rating scale used in its construction. An individual’s beliefs, expectations, opinions, likes and dislikes, contribute towards the formation of his or her attitude. Hence the rating scale constructed for this measure contains items for these components, and the items then calibrated in order that individual attitude measures can be obtained. These calibrations will be used as anchors for all future measures of this attitude, at different time points, thereby enabling comparability for the tracking of attitudinal change over time, from entry point into their respective programmes at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore, up to the time they serve as beginning teachers in schools. As a triangulation to these quantitative measures, a smaller sample of subjects were selected and interviewed. This study involves three categories of teacher trainees at NIE. They are the Diploma in Education, Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Primary), Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) and the B.A./B.Sc. Degree programme. In this paper we discuss the entry point attitudinal measures and the possible reasons for the differences observed between the different programme categories. An elaboration will also be given on the scaling techniques used