Investigative Study on the Self-Perceived Level of Teachers’ Professional Development Correlated with the Attitude Toward the Continuous Training in Romania

Abstract

Professional development throughout continuous training programs has a major role in teachers’ career path. The effectiveness of these programs can be acknowledged by every teacher, as long as the aims of the programs are proper for one’s professional needs. Teachers’ attitude towards these programs is also very important. The study we conducted probed the opinion of a non-probability sample consisting of 118 teachers from urban and rural areas as concerns their capacity to correlate the level of professional training with the attitude toward the need for continuous training in their career. By choosing a quantitative method, the investigation on the basis of a questionnaire was used with the intention to find out not only the ability of self-evaluation reported at the level of the training, but also the motivation, attitudes and teachers’ expectations regarding the need for continuous professional development. The self-evaluation questions provided respondents’ perceptions of the investigation thus, allowing us to further understand issues related to their internal nature. Therefore, sometimes these items involve difficulties in establishing the accuracy of the answers provided as regards finding a correspondence between the actual respondents’ opinions and those expressed in the suitable or not so suitable answers.