Track: Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

Passion for teaching is one of the aspects of the teaching profession. The literature showed that teachers’ passion is one of the essential factors to become quality prospective teachers and retaining them in the profession.  Therefore, this passion must exist since being a student. However, not all vocational pre-teacher students are interested to become teachers, some of them are interested to become engineers or entrepreneurs. This research aims to investigate factors influencing the choice of education amongst pre-teacher students. The first-year pre-teacher’s students (n = 76) were surveyed to investigate the influenced factors for choosing vocational teacher education institutions. Exploratory factor analyses were used to examine influencing factors for choosing vocational teacher education institutions. The results showed that passion to be an engineer is the strongest influential factor. This finding is contrary to graduates' profile of vocational teacher education institutions that most graduates will become vocational teachers. The relationships between personal motivations, passion to be a teacher or engineer, and participants’ perceptions for future demand are discussed as well.