Journal of Education and Psychology

Abstract

Since the onset of teacher education programs in colleges, students have difficulties in deciding whether to apply for the programs or not. The committees of the programs struggle in selecting applicants. In the meantime, primary and secondary schools suffer in choosing beginning teachers. The first step to resolve the problem is to identify core jobs of beginning teachers, which is the main purpose of this study. Through a literature review, interview, and pretests, we classify 50 core jobs under six dimensions. The resulting inventories were administered to 210 female secondary teachers, 87 male secondary teachers, 294 female college students, and 182 male college students. The Rasch technique was used to analyze the data. It was found that most teachers consider these 50 jobs important to beginning teachers. Dimensions “classroom management” and “guidance and counseling” are the most important. The college students, assuming themselves to be beginning teachers, consider themselves capable of these 50 jobs, especially the jobs about “planning and preparing instruction.” However, they feel relatively incapable of the jobs about “classroom management.” Applications and implications of the findings are discussed in three aspects: college students, educational institution, and secondary schools.

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