An Opinionaire on why College Students Choose to Teach

Abstract

A critical shortage of teachers became apparent following World War H. Although a number of fac tors contributed to this situation, the decreased birth rate during the depression years of the 1930's with its resulting decline in the supply from which to recruit potential teachers, and the increased birth rate during the 1940's with a growth of ele mentary school enrollments six year s later have doubtless been primarily responsible for our great need for teachers. The current shortage of teachers is stimulating many individuals as well as countless organizations and groups to try to recruit young for the teaching profession. Increasingly one hear s and reads of the term selective recruitment. In or der to develop or improve recruitment techniques it becomes necessary to try to find out why students now in teacher education programs in college have chosen to become teachers. This article compares the results of three investigations, the first of which was conducted in 1946** and repeated in 1948 and in 19562 to see if differences or similarities exist during a ten-year span in the opinions expressed by college students on why they had chosen to enter the teaching profession. In trying to secure information on the qu e s t i o n Why do young men and women choose to teach? a teacher recruitment committee prepared a check list of sixteen statements of possible factors which might have influenced college students to choose teaching as a profession. This check list, prepared by the committee in 1946, was administered to 177 men and 108 women students in the C o liege of the Pacific, Chico State College, and the College of Ag riculture of the University of California. In 1948 it was given to 240 men and 227 women students in the College of the Pacific, Chico State College, and Sacramento State College. The 1956 administration was confined to the College of the Pacific with 103 men and 123 women students involved. In each case the sixteen statements were used in an opinion sur' vey of full-time college students actually enrolled in teacher education courses. The students were asked to check all of the statements that might have influenced them in their choice of becoming teach ers. The lists were returned unsigned to avoid any suggestion that the responses would be used to judge individual motives. As indicated in Table I, the responses to the check list are fairly equally divided between the two sexes, with 520 men and 458 women students. A chi square (X = 15.966), indicates a signficant difference in the ratios of men and women f or the three investigations pointing to the necessity of treating the two sexes separately rather than as a single group. For purposes of this report, each of the sixteen items of the check list has been conde nsed into a brief, self-explanatory phrase as it appears in Table H. The statements of the opinion survey are arranged in this table in order of their percentage rank of the 1956 replies of 103 men. A chi square for both men and women indicates nosignificant variation of ratios of students to the number of questions which they checked in the three studies. The results of the three studies are summarized in Table II. The per cent of individuals checking each item of influencing factors is presented for each of the surveys made in 1946, 19 4 8, and 1956 with differentiations for men and women. For example, 68 per cent of the men checked ''Interest in children and young people in 1 9 46 as a reason for choosing to become a teacher, 74 per cent in 1948, and 77 per cent in 1956. For the same item 90 per cent of the women marked this in 1946, 80 per cent in 1948, and 93 per cent in 1956. This factor was given the highest rating by both men and women in all three studies. There was no signifi cant shift for either men or women from one study to the next. Three other items in the check list remained consistently high for both men and wo m en. These