THE PREDICTIVE POWER OF OCCUPATIONAL ANXIETY LEVELS OF PROSPECTIVE PHYSICAL EDUCATION TEACHERS UPON THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE TEACHING PROFESSION

The aim of this study is to determine the predictive power of occupational anxiety of prospective physical education teachers upon their attitudes towards the teaching profession. Relational research method was used in the study. The study group consisted of 118 (36.6%) females and 204 (63.4%) males, a total of 322 student teachers (Mage=20.87, SD=2.09) studying at physical education and sports teacher education departments in four different universities. The “Occupational Anxiety Scale for Prospective Teachers” and “Attitudes towards Physical Education Profession Scale” were used as the data collection tools. For independent groups along with the descriptive statistics, inferential statistics like t-test, a test to find the difference between the arithmetic means, correlation and regression analysis were used. The study illustrated that the occupational anxiety level is an important predictor upon the attitude levels towards the teaching profession and the variables constituting the occupational anxiety sub-dimension accounted for 57% of the total variance in the attitude levels towards the teaching profession. Furthermore, it was found that the prospective teachers’ attitude scores towards teaching profession were high, and their occupational concerns scores were low.