Abstract:
Teaching is increasingly a feminised profession with severe shortages of STEM teachers (OECD, 2005), yet fewer girls and women remain in the STEM pipeline into university. We profile future mathematics, science and ICT teachers' characteristics, motivations and perceptions, contrasting men/women, career-changers, undergraduates/graduates. Against previously described profiles (Richardson & Watt, 2006), we consider future STEM teachers. 245 future teachers from three Australian universities. Relatively low proportions of candidates specialised in one of mathematics (21%), ICT (28%), or science (52%). Combinations were mostly among STEM disciplines (some with humanities, visual/performing arts, social studies and languages). Background characteristics included gender, home-language, career history, teaching specialisms, parents' jobs/income. The validated Factors Influencing Teaching (FIT-)Choice scale, designed to assess teacher motivations and perceptions (Watt & Richardson, 2007), is grounded in Eccles et al.'s expectancy-value theory (1983,2009). The FIT-Choice scale measured (i) motivations: intrinsic value, personal utility values, social utility values, teaching abilities, "fallback" career, social influences, prior positive teaching and learning experiences; (ii) perceptions: salary, status, difficulty, expertise required, career choice satisfaction. Factors were measured by multiple item indicators rated 1-7, prefaced for motivation items by "I chose to become a teacher because...". Surveys were administered in tutorial classes early in 1st-year.Mathematics and ICT attracted more men; conversely for science. At one university which disaggregated specialisms, the percentage of women future physics teachers was low (<25%), compared with biology (>75%) and chemistry (61%). 43% future STEM teachers had parents in STEM-related areas; 10% had teacher parents. Overall, job transferability, making a social contribution, and teaching as a fallback career motivated men significantly more than women future STEM teachers. For science, women rated working with adolescents higher than men; undergraduate men were more motivated to work with children than graduates, and graduate women more so than undergraduates. Graduate men rated teaching as an expert career more than undergraduates; conversely for women. ICT women rated the demands of teaching higher than men. Some gendered motivations suggest different attractors for men/women to become STEM teachers at the undergraduate/graduate-entry level. Although evenly represented in other sciences, low proportions of women were entering physics, mathematics and ICT teaching. Roughly half had parents from STEM-related careers, and themselves had prior careers in STEM. Motivations were broadly similar to our general sample (Richardson & Watt,2006), indicating recruitment campaigns targeting those motivations should be effective, and graduates working in STEM-related careers as a source of future teachers.