Motivations to enter teaching: an investigation with non-education university students

Teachers are motivated by extrinsic, intrinsic, and altruistic values, but little is known about what might convince other students to become educators. Conducted in two stages, the present study uses a survey to show education majors and non-education majors have different impressions of how careers in education satisfy intrinsic, extrinsic, and altruistic motivations. Then, a randomized experiment shows that prompts concerning extrinsic, intrinsic, and altruistic values increased the interest in teaching among non-education majors. But important differences appeared along lines of gender and academic achievement. Female participants responded positively to intrinsic values but males responded to extrinsic values. High achieving students responded more to altruistic prompts.