Primary or Secondary School? On the Motivation for Choosing Teacher Education

The decision on a particular teacher education program depends amongst others on students motivation. Previous research has investigated rather general than teacher specific motivational predictors. The present research deals with the question how students from different teacher education programs differ with regard to the "Motivation for Choosing Teacher Education Questionnaire" (FEMOLA) drawing on a sample of 3449 freshman students. Multinomial logistic regression models have been tested to analyze the association between the choice of an education program and the motivation for choosing teacher education, gender, social background, previous achievement, and personality traits. As one main finding it was observed that subject interest was strongly related to choosing an academic track program, whereas educational interest was rather related to the choice of an elementary or non-academic track program. Moreover, more differentiated subscales were observed in the FEMOLA (monetary and familial utility) and the assumption of (partial) measurement invariance was supported.