Examination of Attitudes towards Profession and Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Pedagogical Formation Students

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between attitudes towards the teaching proficiency and self-efficacy belief of the pedagogical formation students. For this purpose 508 pedagogic formation students from Çankırı Karatekin University and Hacettepe University participated in the study. Participants filled in the “Scale for Proficiency Self-Efficacy Beliefs” and “Scale for Attitudes toward Teaching Profession”. Both of the scales were checked for whether they are valid and reliable. To investigate if the scales were valid, confirmatory factor analysing was used and seen that the both scale is valid. In order to understand whether the scales are reliable, Cronbach alpha coefficient were calculated and detected that the both scales are reliable. Collected data from the participants were firstly analysed with descriptive statistical techniques including arithmetical means, standard deviations and the value of percentage. To examine the relationship between attitudes towards teaching profession and profession self-efficacy beliefs Pearson correlation coefficient were used. To examine if the self–efficacy beliefs is the significant predictor of the attitudes towards the teaching profession multiple regression was used. Results showed that participants' opinions about their attitudes towards the teaching profession are positive. Besides this, it was seen that participants' self-efficacy beliefs on profession is relatively high. Correlation analyses indicated that there is low, positively and significant relations between proficiency self-efficacy beliefs and attitudes towards teaching profession. Regression results revealed that proficiency self-efficacy is a significant predictor of the attitudes towards the teaching profession. However, it was observed that proficiency self-efficacy beliefs explain the little portion of the variance in attitudes towards teaching profession