FACTORS INFLUENCING MATHEMATICS TEACHING AS A CAREER CHOICE: AN INSTRUMENT DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION IN THE PHILIPPINE CONTEXT

With the current issues and situations of mathematics education in the Country, the study endeavored to develop and validate the Factors Influencing Mathematics Teaching as a Career Choice – an instrument to assess the motivations, specifically of secondary mathematics pre-service teachers, in choosing mathematics teaching as their career. This was done by adopting the items of the Factors Influencing Teaching as a Career Choice instrument by Watt and Richardson (2007) and in consideration with the notion that content mathematics could be among the motivations of secondary pre-service teachers in choosing math teaching as their career. The study was conducted with 171 secondary mathematics pre-service teachers (SMPTs) in two prominent teacher education institutions in the Cordillera Administrative Region. A Factor analysis was used to determine the different motivation constructs considered by the participants in entering the math teaching career. Also, the internal reliability and construct validity of the finalized item of the instrument were established using Cronbach’s and experts’ validation, respectively. The results assert that the SMPTs consider ten valid and reliable constructs in choosing mathematics teaching as their career. Particularly, the SMPTs separate the mathematics, the teaching, and the combined mathematics teaching aspects of the mathematics teaching career as their motivations in entering the math teaching career. Thus, the FIMT-Choice Scale assess more specific areas of motivations in choosing mathematics teaching as a career among SMPTs compared with the FIT-Choice Scale by Watt and Richardson (2007), which measure the motivations in choosing teaching, in general, as a career.