Investigating Education students’ interest to teaching profession

Introduction. The article is devoted to the need to obtain relevant knowledge about the level of professional interest of future teachers at the stage of pursuing a degree in Education. The purpose of the study is to identify the level of Education students’ interest in teaching profession. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of the study is the personal-activity approach, which allows us to consider the problem of professional interest in teaching career from the position of personal motivation of the student, professional-research focus of their activities at the university. The study is conducted using the following methods: theoretical analysis of scholarly sources on the research problem, questionnaire, statistical processing (Pearson’s chi-square criterion). Results. The authors of the article obtained the following results: - analyzed and summarized Russian and international studies devoted to the issues of professional interest in teaching, its components; - professional interest in teaching is defined as an emotionally colored, value-based attitude of a student to the teaching profession, based on interest in developing and becoming a competent professional in the chosen field, which has its own structure, consisting of emotional-motivational, cognitive and reflexive-activity components. - presented and substantiated empirical results of the study, which reflect the levels of students’ professional interest in teaching according to the indicators (emotional-motivational, cognitive, reflexive-activity). Conclusions. The authors conclude that medium and low levels of professional interest in teaching prevail, which indicates the need to organize targeted work on developing professional interest in teaching.