Relationships of status characteristics and choices of working environment as perceived by students in the Teacher Education Program at the University of Houston

This study focused on the social status of beginning students in teacher education at the University of Houston, an urban institution, in the fall of 1968 as it related to their choices of working environments. Purposes were (1) to develop an instrument appropriate for periodic use in identifying social orientations of students beginning teacher education and to what extent their choices of working environments reflected their social orientations, (2) to ascertain statistically significant relationships, if any, between social orientation and choices of working environments, (3) to ascertain statistically significant relationships, if any, between size and type of schools attended and choices of working environments, and (4) to ascertain the nature of high school curricular experiences and preferred curricular patterns fur teaching. Data were collected from 399 students on a 34-item questionnaire; administered in teacher education classes. Tabulations and computations for each questionnaire item were reported, including means and standard deviations, Pearson product-moment correlations, chi square, and an analysis of variance. The profile of respondents revealed that age and marital status were the same as revealed in a study of a similar population at the University in 1962 and that the present group was slightly older than were respondents to a national study conducted in 1961. [...]