Perfil do licenciando e sua escolha pela carreira docente

Abstract (full paper below)

Title: Undergraduate students' profile and their choice of teaching as a career

We use a longitudinal panel that accompanies for four or five years - from admission to completion - two cohorts of students who entered undergraduate courses (2010 and 2011) in Brazilian colleges. The longitudinal panel is the result of the merge of several databases administered by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira - Inep (Census of Basic Education, Census of Higher Education, National Examination of High School - Enem and National Examination of Student Performance - Enade) and the database of all formal labor contracts, administered by the Ministry of Economics (Rais - Annual Social Information). In the possession of this logitudinal database, the undergraduate students were divided into four groups, having as criterion the moment in which they were or were not related to the teaching career, whether before or after entering College. The students who already have a teaching career or entered teaching after entering College or after graduation show the highest completion rate (up to 5 years) and the lowest dropout rate. The students associated to the teaching career underperform in the general knowledge component of Enade, even after controlling for course and institution, but this lower performance is explained by their sociodemographic caracteristics. The students who never entered teaching profession, either before or after enrollment in College, on average, study in institutions and courses whose students perform better in exams. Regarding the specific component of Enade (course content such as didactics), in spite of the fact that, on average, the students who were teachers when entering Higher Education also had lower average performance in the test of specific knowledge, after controlling the students' sociodemographic characteristics and the characteristics of the institution and courses they attend, this relation is reversed, i.e., these students outperform their counterparts. We also find that having another university degree contributes positively to student's specific knowledge and, despite the fact that the experience in general counts negatively for tests performance, in the case of teachers and the specific component, her/his experience as a teacher reinforce the positive association between previous diploma and test performance.