Employment hopes, academic motivations, and career plans of prospective teachers

Training prospective teachers as more qualified educators has always been considered by researchers as a significant issue. The present study aims to present how current technological, social, and economical developments as well as internal motivation sources of prospective teachers such as self-efficacy and self-respect have an effect upon their job hopes, academic motivations, and career plans in the context of their department, gender, age, and socio-economic status. The overall study objective is to present the effects of prospective teachers' employment hopes on their motivation and career plans. Relational screening model was used in the research. Achievement-Oriented Motivation Scale developed by Semerci (2010) and Employment Hope Scale developed by Hong, Polanin and Pigott and translated into Turkish by Akın, Hamedoğlu, Kaya, and Sarıçam (2013) were used as measurement tools and 788 prospective teachers were selected from Sakarya, Düzce, Kocaeli, and Abant İzzet Baysal University with random sample methods. The collected data were numerically analyzed by SPSS 24.0 (Statiscal Package For Social Sciences). Before data analysis, it was tested whether data showed normal distribution. When data followed normal distribution, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Kruskal Wallis, Shapiro-Wilk, Post-Hoc ve Ki-Kare tests were used in data analysis. Descriptive statistics such as frequency (f) and percentage (%) were utilized in the analysis of participants' career plans. The findings obtained show that prospective teachers training at departments which are based on verbal skills and participants under 19 ages have more employment hopes than the others. Furthermore, there is no significant difference between academic motivations of prospective teachers and age, gender, and level of income whereas they differ by participants' undergraduate program.