THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERSONALITY AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS TEACHING PROFESSION OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

Teacher quality and teacher education are two major issues for a democratic society committed to excellence in teaching and learning for all of its participants (Levine, 2010). Not only in instructional aspects, but also in the aspect of social and psychological development teachers should be considered (Richardson, 2003).Teachers help students improve their personality and shape their general philosophy of life (Hesapcioglu, 1988). Related to this, teachers' personality comes into prominence so that they are thought as a role-model for their students (Senel, Demir, Sertelin, Kilicaslan, & Koksal, 2004). Besides having such an important role on students' personality and their overall visions towards life, some studies showed that teachers' personality had an impact on teacher effectiveness and teacher training (Senel et al., 2004; Bedel, 2008; Arif et al., 2012; Bektas & Nalcaci, 2012; Pigge & Marso, 1994; Ajzen, 1998; Richardson, 2003; Albion & Fogarty, 2002). Accordingly, it can be said that personality is a sophisticated phenomenon influencing learning, teaching and as well as teacher training in educational environments. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between pre-service teachers' attitudes towards teaching profession and their personality. In that manner, the following questions are tried to answer: (1) What are the attitudes of preservice teachers towards teaching profession? (2) What is the personality of pre-service teachers? (3) What is the relationship between pre-service teachers' attitudes towards teaching profession? A correlational research design was conducted. Participants of the study were 340 pre-service teachers from seven different departments of education faculty. Based on convenient and purposeful sampling, junior and senior students were chosen because they were responsible for the courses related to teaching professions after 2nd grade. As data collection tools, two questionnaires were employed namely the Attitude Measurement Scale for Teaching Profession (Ustuner, 2006) and the Turkish version of NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) (Kusdil, 2006; Atabek, 2013). The scale measures the five factors of personality: Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Openness to Experience (O), Agreeableness (A), and Conscientiousness (C). By the help of the SPSS software (version 22.0), the gathered data was analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that the pre-service teachers had positive attitudes towards teaching profession. As for pre-services personality traits, the pre-service teachers had highest and similar mean scores for conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience, respectively. Mean score of agreeableness were lower than neuroticism. Thus, it seems pre-service teachers identified their personality mostly as conscientious, and less as agreeable. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards teaching profession and the personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion. This study contributes to the growing body of the literature on teacher education, especially in relation to teachers' attitudes to the teaching profession and their personality in Turkey. From this point of view, the personality traits of pre-service teachers should be taken into account while designing or developing instructional and/or educational environments in teacher education programs.