Comparison of the Effects of Gender Variable on Attitudes Towards the Teaching Profession by Random and Fixed Effects Model: Meta-Analysis

Attitude is a dual-poled essence: possessing positive thoughts on a course or subject, liking a course or exhibiting positive affective nature in relation with it, or having negative thoughts on a course or subject, disliking it or exhibiting negative affective features in relation with it (Bloom, 1979). Attitudes are different from opinions, values and beliefs. Attitudes and opinions resemble each other, but they differ from attitudes in terms of degree of generalizability and the measuring technique. Opinions are personal reactions to specific occurrences and conditions. But attitudes should be taken in a more general sense, as they influence people's reactions against sets of events and groups of people, in a more broad sense. The teaching profession has been mentioned among the favorite occupations, and researchers wanted to know if attitudes have anything to do with this tendency. It has been a subject for many researches that attitudes towards teaching profession differ by gender (Cook & Medley, 1954; Capri & Celikkaleli, 2008; Cetin, 2003; Dogan & Coban, 2009). The aim of this research is to determine the impact of gender variable on the teaching profession via meta-analysis method. Effect models specified for meta-analysis have been compared. This research covers the results of meta-analysis combining 27 researches determined useful by master's theses and doctorate dissertations which take gender as the variable. Effect size of the gender in relation with the attitude towards the teaching profession is found to be 0.301 for the fixed effect model, and 0.304 for the random effect model. When a frequency table for directions of effect sizes is created, 20 researches (74%) showed a positive effect size. Together with this result, 74% of the researches explain that females have more positive attitudes over males. Absence of any 0 effect size in this research explain that there has been no research indicating that attitudes towards the teaching profession do not differ between males and females. It has been concluded that medium differences exist according to Cohen's classification, and small differences exist according to Thalheimer's classification. It has been inferred from these findings that gender is an important variable in terms of attitudes towards the teaching profession, and that the medium effect it possesses over attitude should be examined