Abstract
Professional identity plays an important role in career development. Although many studies have examined professional identity, differences in cognitive-processing biases between Chinese student teachers with strong and weak professional identity are poorly understood. The current study adopted Tversky’s social-cognitive experimental paradigm to explore cognitive-processing biases in Chinese student teachers with strong and weak professional identity. Experiment 1 showed that participants with strong professional identity exhibited stronger positive-coding bias toward positive profession-related life events, relative to that observed in those with weak professional identity. Experiment 2 showed that participants with strong professional identity exhibited greater recognition bias for previously read items, relative to that observed in those with weak professional identity. Overall, the results suggested that participants with strong professional identity exhibited greater positive cognitive-processing bias relative to that observed in those with weak professional identity.
Highlights
Teachers’ professional identity has recently become an independent research topic in the field of education (Beijaard et al, 2004)
The results showed that teachers with strong professional identity exhibited positive cognitiveprocessing bias, while those with weak professional identity exhibited negative cognitive-processing bias involving coding and recognition
The results showed that the number of instances of positive coding bias involving positive items observed in individuals with strong professional identity was significantly higher relative to that observed for those with weak professional identity (Z = −2.32, p = 0.02)
Summary
Teachers’ professional identity has recently become an independent research topic in the field of education (Beijaard et al, 2004). Student teachers’ professional identity is dynamic and develops during the process involved in learning to teach (Hong, 2010; Trent, 2011; Izadinia, 2013). Current research examining student teachers’ professional identity is in the preliminary stage (Feng et al, 2010; Timoštšuk and Ugaste, 2010) and tends to involve theoretical discussion and scale measurement rather than empirical studies (Timoštšuk and Ugaste, 2010; Wang et al, 2011; Lei et al, 2012). Student teachers with strong professional identity were able to overcome
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