Career Motivation Among Teacher Trainees

The purpose of this study was to determine the differences on gender, place of origin and age contribute towards teaching career extrinsic, intrinsic and altruistic motives among 206 trainees in Batu Pahat Teacher Training College. This includes the relationship among the motives, the dependency of teaching career motives, the variance in teaching career motives with respect to demographic characteristics namely gender, race, place of origin, age, level of educational attainment, primary school setting, and secondary school setting. The questionnaire used in this study mainly adopted from Chan’s (1998) Yong’s (1995 & 1994) Brown’s (1992) and Noran’s (1990a) studies. The researcher personally administered the self-reporting questionnaire throughout this study. The overall teaching career motives’ items showed a Cronbach alpha value of 0.7383 for the pilot test conducted. The results of the study indicated that: (1) there was a significant difference in place of origin towards intrinsic and altruistic motives and there was a significant difference in age towards extrinsic motives; (2) there was a positive relation among extrinsic, intrinsic and altruistic motives with highest value of 0.779 between intrinsic and altruistic motives; (3) the demographic characteristics studied explained 15.4 percent of the variance in teaching career motives; (4) a Stepwise Multiple Regression Analysis showed that race was the best predictor in teaching career motives; (5) the teaching career motives was dependent on gender, race, place of origin, primary school setting, and secondary school setting but independent of age and level of educational attainment; finally (6) “Teaching is a sacred profession” as an intrinsic motive showed a highest mean score among the trainees