Objective

Teacher ability and teacher beliefs have been shown to be closely tied to student learning and student achievement (Bandura 1993, Goddard 2002, OECD 2005). A recent report reveals that many OECD countries are currently experiencing the shortage of qualified teachers, aging teaching workforce and high levels of early career burnout and attrition. Attracting effective teachers in the coming year should be a considerably important concern for all OECD countries (OECD 2009b). For example, in the UK context, about 40% of people who commence on a teaching training course in England never have taken up a teaching job; and of those who do enter teaching, about 40% were leaving teaching and changed to another career within one to five years (Kyriacou & Kunc 2007). Similarly, according to a review of teacher education in Scotland (Donaldson 2011), there have been difficulties in attracting and retaining effective teachers across the UK, particularly in encouraging science and mathematics graduates into the teaching profession. In this connection, if policy makers or schools would like to attract highly qualified and committed people into teaching, they need to understand the reasons behind the choice of a teaching career as well as the factors sustain teacher commitment, interest and enthusiasm. To date, less attention has been received to addressing this issue in a comprehensive way, particularly in the Scottish context. This research thus primarily aims to contributes towards an understanding of what underpins student teachers who already embarked on teacher education programme in Scotland to pursue a teaching career, and attempts to explore what motivates them at different points in their career by comparing between those who chose teaching as their first choice and those who changed their career to teaching.

Theoretical Framework

This research is coached within Watt and Richardson's (2007) Factors Influencing Teaching Choice (FIT- Choice) Framework, underpinned by expectancy-value motivational theory (Eccles et al. 1983; Eccles 2005). This framework sheds light on why individuals choose teaching as a career choice, their perceptions about the demand and reward of a teaching profession as well as the level of career satisfaction and commitment (Richardson & Watt, 2006). Although a large array of the studies suggest that motivations or reasons for choosing a teaching career fall into three main categories: intrinsic, extrinsic and altruistic reasons (Bastick, 2000; De Cooman et al., 2007; Kyriacou & Coulthard,  2000; Moran et al., 2001; Sinclair, 2008; Yong, 1995), Watt and Richardson (2007, 2012) argue that this traditional typology might be lack of a precise definition and influential factors regarding social influences and prior teaching and learning experiences (Richardson & Watt, 2006; Watt & Richardson, 2007). The design of FIT-Choice framework is in response to the absence of a cohesive and holistic framework in the area of teacher motivation and career choice. Specifically, FIT-Choice model taps various underlying motives identified in the existing literature and has been validated across various contexts including Australia, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, Norway, the USA and China with sound evidence of reliability and construct validity (Eren & Tezel 2010; Watt et al., 2012). Therefore, the FIT-Choice framework might provide a more systematic integrative and reliable way to understand why teaching is chosen as a career choice.

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