An investigation on the relationship between prospective teachers' early teacher identity and their need for cognition

Identifying pre-service teachers' need for cognition and their pre-service teacher identities may guide the explanations on teacher development, and investigating the relationship between them can reveal important implications vital for classroom practice in teacher education institutions. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship between pre-service teachers' early teacher identity and their need for cognition. It was also intended to investigate whether there is a relationship between pre-service teachers' early teacher identity, need for cognition and their gender, GPA, study year, department, schooling background, and teaching experience. The research data was collected with the selection of the sample which consists of 449 students studying at Gaziantep Education Faculty (Departments of English Language Teaching, Turkish Language Teaching, Primary School Teaching, and Mathematics Teaching at Primary Education) in 2013-2014, Spring Term. "Early Teacher Identity Measure (ETIM)" (Friesen & Besley, 2013), adapted to Turkish by the researcher, was used to measure pre-service teacher identities of teacher candidates. The data related to the need for cognition were collected by "Need For Cognition Scale (NFCS)" (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; adapted to Turkish by Gülgöz & Sadowski, 1996), the data related to attitudes towards teaching profession were collected by using "Attitude towards Teaching Profession Scale (ATPS)" (Çetin, 2006) and lastly, the data related to the personal information of the students were gathered by "Personal Information Form" which was designed by the researcher. The raw data obtained from the scales were analysed by using SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.1. After completing all necessary translation and linguistic equivalence processes in a proper scale adaptation study, confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses were conducted in order to investigate ETIM's psychometric properties. The other adaptation analyses included the split-half reliability coefficient and the test-retest reliability of the scale, item discrimination analysis calculated through a comparison between the top and bottom 27% groups, and criterion validity analysis. All these analyses revealed that the adapted version of ETIM meets all the requirements of an adapted scale in another culture, and the total score can be used as 'ETIM score'. As a second important step, the relationship between early teacher identity and need for cognition was investigated through a Pearson Product Moment Correlation, and it was found that early teacher identity and need for cognition are two separate but related constructs (r= .62, p<.01). This means that as the level of need for cognition increases, the participants' early teacher identity scores increase. Lastly, the analyses on the demographic variables were conducted via Pearson Product Moment Correlation, independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, and Mann-Whitney U Test, and results revealed important results supported by the literature. Key words: Identity, Professional identity, Teacher identity, Early teacher identity,Construction of pre-service teacher identity, Need for Cognition, Teacher Cognition