Prospective teachers' aspirations to achieve professional goals and their beliefs about the attainability of them: The roles of teacher identity and possible selves

The present study had three central research objectives. First, it aimed to examine whether prospective teachers' aspirations to achieve professional goals were significantly related to their beliefs about the attainability of these goals, professional identities, and possible selves. Second, it aimed to investigate whether prospective teachers' aspirations to achieve professional goals, identities, and possible selves significantly predicted their beliefs about the attainability of these goals. Third, it aimed to explore whether prospective teachers' professional identities and possible selves played significant mediating roles in the relationships between their professional goals and their beliefs about the attainability of these goals. This study was descriptive in nature. It was designed as an explanatory correlational research study. In the study, data obtained from 2303 prospective teachers, majoring in special education teaching, preschool teaching, science teaching, mathematics teaching, English language teaching and Turkish language teaching were used. They were randomly sampled from the Faculties of Education of Abant Izzet Baysal University, Kocaeli University, and Akdeniz University. Data were gathered through multiple data collection instruments; namely, Questionnaire for the Assessment of Teacher Goals, Questionnaire for the Assessment of Teacher Beliefs about the Attainability of Teacher Goals, Early Teacher Identity Measure, New Teacher Possible Selves Questionnaire, Life Orientation Test-Revised and Good Impression Scale. Data were collected by the researcher during the autumn semester of the 2016-2017 academic year. They were analyzed on a computer and via SPSS 20 and AMOS 24 statistical programs. Before addressing the research questions, a series of univariate and multivariate analyses of covariance and subsequent analyses of variance were conducted to investigate the possible effects of demographic variables (i.e., gender, university, fields of study, and year of study) on the research variables. For the first and second research questions, a partial correlation and a series of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted. For the third research question, structural equation modeling analyses were performed. In the analyses, the possible intervening effects of prospective teachers' age and their optimism and good impression scores were also controlled. The results of the study showed that professional goals of the prospective teachers were multi-dimensional. The results also demonstrated that prospective teachers' aspirations to achieve professional goals were significantly and positively related to their beliefs about the attainability of these goals, teacher identities, and expected teacher possible selves, independently of the intervening effects of demographic and control variables. In addition, the results indicated that teacher identity as well as professionalism and learning to teach played significant mediating roles in the relationships between professional goals and beliefs about the attainability of these goals.