A Study On The Content And Type Of The Free Normal Students' Psychological Contract

In May 2007, a new policy released by the State Council put the decade of charging teacher education to an end and free teacher education because the mainstream of education policy. The implement of the new policy is an important move of the country to promote respect for teachers. In September 2007, the first group of future teachers got their admission to a number of normal universities for free, and the training of those students and employment after their graduation become hot topics.The purpose of this study is, from the perspective of the social psychology, to apply the "psychological contract" theory in the study of the group of students who is experiencing the free teacher education. Using both qualitative and qualitative method in the current research, we investigated free normal students' content of psychological contract at first, and then explored the structure and characteristics of psychological contract.This research includes two parts. In the first part, a questionnaire on free normal students' psychological contract was developed through semi-structured interviews on schools' and students' obligations in the free teacher training process. Based on those interviews, questionnaires of school's obligations and students' obligations were developed, and the final questionnaires were confirmed after factor analysis and other psychometric analysis. In the second part, characteristics and types of free normal students' psychological contract were further explored, and comparisons on students' satisfaction, sense of purpose, affective commitment and the breach in the psychological contract were analyzed.The results show that: (1) The questionnaire of free normal students psychological contract is reliable and valid; (2) The questionnaire of school obligations includes four dimensions: the obligations of overall quality of training, material and information support, continuing education and teaching skills development; and the questionnaire of student obligations also includes four dimensions: the obligations of identifying the role of a teacher, developing the teaching skills, following the teaching contract and training for professional research quality; (3) The score of free normal students psychological contract varies significantly in some demographic characters such as gender, grade, district and economics status; (4) free normal students psychological contract can be categorized into four types, and most of the students are of the mutual high obligations or mutual low obligations; (5) students' scores of satisfaction, sense of purpose and affective commitment vary significantly in different psychological contract types; (6) there is a phenomenon of breach in free normal students' psychological contract, and it may has some correlations with those students' high expectations on school's obligations.