Exploring factors influencing high school graduates' decision to become technical teachers: A quantitative analysis

Abstract

Understanding why high school graduates with or without technical-subject backgrounds opt to become technical teachers at the expense of their graduating grade has become a puzzle to technical teacher educators. Although the literature suggests that interest and prior knowledge could explain a person’s choice of academic pursuit, these submissions remain speculations in technical education. This study, therefore, used quantitative data from 119 pre-service technical teachers to examine the relationship between situational interest, realisation competence, high school technical-subject background knowledge, and age. The study showed that on average pre-service technical teachers demonstrated an outstanding level of realisation competence but a moderate situational interest in design and realisation courses. Generally, moderate to high levels of correlation was observed between realisation competence, situational interest, and age. Furthermore, the combined effect of situational interest, age, and high school background knowledge predicted about 34.2% of the variance in realisation competence. Nonetheless, situational interest was the primary predictor, while high school background knowledge was not a significant predictor. Additionally, the study showed that pre-service teachers with high school technical-subject backgrounds outperformed their peers without high school technical knowledge in situational interest rating and realisation competence.