An examination of preservice teachers’ intentions to pursue careers in special education

Zhang, D., Wang, Q., Losinski, M., & Katsiyannis, A. (2014). An examination of preservice teachers’ intentions to pursue careers in special education. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(2), 156-171.


There is currently a serious shortage of qualified special education teachers in the United States, even as the demand for such teachers is increasing. This article clearly states that problem, and its urgency. Unfortunately, the article does not really provide any solutions or even ideas for possible ways to solve the problem.

One major thing about this study that makes its findings less useful than they might have been is the choice of the population to study. The study participants were students in an introductory special education course in a preservice special education program. They were offered incentives (“bonus points”) in the course for participating, and most had no experience working in special education settings. The data were entirely drawn from a long (99 questions!) survey that attempted to get at their feelings of efficacy as special education teachers, their outcome expectations for pursuing a career in special education, and their interest in working with learners with special needs. Demographic data were also gathered, as well as information about these preservice special education teachers’ work experiences and personal experiences with special needs learners.

In general, the outlook of these study participants was rosy, which is often not surprising in teacher candidates in introductory teacher education courses. They have idealized images of themselves as being able to help with all kinds of difficulties and being able to make a difference and serve the profession. I don’t want to say that this idealism is a bad thing. My hope is that future teachers can keep at least some of those feelings, even after they have been confronted with classroom and societal realities. However, for this study to draw any kind of conclusions from a survey done with participants without actual classroom experience is really not plausible. This limitation of the study is very briefly mentioned at the end of the article, but not really discussed in depth, and I think it should be. Of course, that would then beg the question: Why was this study even done this way in the first place? It certainly was a convenient way to gather data, reminiscent of many psychology dissertations. Create a survey, and then administer it in one sitting to a captive audience who can be persuaded with an inexpensive incentive. Then throw the survey’s numbers into some software and let it perform sophisticated statistical analyses. You will get some numbers from this approach, numbers that can be manipulated in countless ways. But what will they tell us that can help with the problem? In this case, I don’t think we are told very much. A longer, perhaps longitudinal study which looked at intentions and perceptions throughout an entire career trajectory might tell us some things that would be helpful. Of course, that would be a more difficult and expensive study to conduct, and would take time.

The authors attempt to test an existing theoretical model (Lent’s Social Cognitive Career Theory) that has been used for examining people’s intentions to pursue careers other than special education teaching, and most of their statistical analyses involved attempts to superimpose their data upon that model and to tweak the model to fit intentions to become special education teachers. While there were some interesting findings about the role that work and life experiences with special needs learners could play in shaping career intentions, once again, the nature of the participant sample and indeed, the design of the study itself limit what can be done with those findings.

As a teacher educator, I do not want to know what theoretical model fits a set of data from students in an introductory course. I do want to know how these teachers’ career intentions are shaped over time. I want to know who decides to become a special education teacher, and why. I want to know who stays in special education and who quits in mid-career, and why. Most importantly, I want to know how to recruit good special education teachers, how best to prepare them, and how best to support them in the classroom. This article did not even begin to get at any of those questions.