Career Choice

This study examined cognitive style data from preservice elementary education students at four universities, discussing how cognitive style affects the choice of teaching as a career. A total of 219 preservice elementary teachers from six classes completed the Paragon Learning Style Inventory, which obtains measures of the four Jungian/Myers-Briggs dimensions (introversion-extroversion, intuitive-sensate, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving). The results indicated that the students ' scores all looked alike, with each class having about the same proportion of each type. The pattern fit the predicted pattern for educators. Comparisons of these data with data on practicing teachers indicated that they had essentially identical patterns, so individuals going into teaching were by cognitive style essentially the same as those currently teaching. This suggests that within the dimension of learning and cognitive style, the teaching personality is not learned but is in fact recruited. Preservice teachers were more extroverted than introverted; more concrete-minded sensates than abstract-thinking intuitives; more of the harmony-seeking feeling type than the logic-needing thinking type; and much more structured, sequentially thinking judgers than spontaneous, flexible thinking perceivers. (Contains 18 references.) (SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Who Gets into Teaching? Cognitive Style as a Variable in Predicting Teaching as