Interactions among Attitudes toward Teaching and Personality Constructs in Early Childhood Pre-service Teachers

The main purpose of this study was to examine early childhood education teachers’ attitudes toward teaching, and their relationship to internal-external locus of control and sociotropy and autonomy orientations. The participants in this study were limited to 180 undergraduate students enrolled in early childhood education in three different universities in Ankara, Turkey. The results showed that the participants had fairly high positive attitudes toward teaching. On the other hand, despite these high positive attitudes, almost half of the participants indicated that their future plans did not include being involved with early childhood education. In general, the demographic characteristics were not significantly related to these attitudes. Attitude toward teaching was negatively related to overall external locus of control and it was not related to internal locus of control at a significant level. In relation to sub-factors, belief in chance and meaninglessness of effort also showed a negative relationship with attitude toward teaching. Attitude toward teaching was not significantly related to either of sociotropy or autonomy orientations. However, when computing correlations with the sub-scales of the Sociotropy and Autonomy Scale, only attitude toward teaching was found negatively correlated with concern about disapproval subscale.