Can I be a teacher without motivation to teach? Adapting the basic psychological needs scale to prospective teachers

Abstract

There are still few studies that address the importance of knowing the psychological needs and frustrations of teachers at the basic levels of education when they are in the training period. The aim of this study was to revalidate the scale of basic psychological needs (S-PNTS) in order to recognize whether it is sufficiently adequate to apply and obtain results with guaranteed success in trainee teachers and to study the inference of socio-demographic and personal variables in frustration and psychological needs. A quantitative methodology has been used following a survey method with a non-experimental design, applied to a sample of 598 university students of the degrees of Teacher in Early Childhood Education and Primary Education, and of the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training in Compulsory Secondary Education of two Spanish universities (one in the north and one in the south) and of equivalent degrees in a Chilean university, with an age range between 18 and 54 years old. The programs used were SPSS.24, Factor.10, MPlus.7 and G*Power 3. After carrying out the factor analyses, the result was that the scale was configured with one less item than the original one but maintaining the three-dimensional scale. The results also reveal that trainee teachers in Primary Education show a greater approximation to frustration than those in Early Childhood and Secondary Education. On the other hand, students from the south of Spain feel less competent, more autonomous and perceive a better relationship in the teaching environment than the rest. Likewise, men perceive themselves as more competent than women.