Culture plays a significant role on how a person experiences the world around himself (Desai, 2007; Triandis, 1993), thus it has an influence on attitudes and behaviors. Since culture refers to the set of ideas, beliefs, assumptions and norms that are shared by a group of people, it serves to guide people’s behavior (Goodenough, 1973). In fact, cultural norms have effect on perceptions and related behavioral outcomes. Such as in education, it is believed that that teachers want to acknowledge cultural tendencies of the students since high degrees of human interaction can be influenced by cultural elements (Furrer, Liu & Sudharshan, 2000). Both students and the teachers come to the school with various expectations and these expectations depend on cultural models or schemas that affect the way they look the world (D’Andrade, 1992). One significant dimension of culture depends on individualism and collectivism that is exhibited (Desai, 2007). Indeed, the content of individualism includes degree to which an individual is most concerned with self interests (Hofstede, 1984). Individualism is characterized by self-reliance, personal achievement, competition, pleasure and independence with an emphasis on what makes the individual distinct (Cho, Kwon, Gentry, Jun & Kropp, 1994; Triandis, 1990). Thus, individualist people’s behavior is mostly determined by personal goals. In contrast, collectivism value family integrity, group cooperation, sociability and interdependence (Schwartz, 1994). Collectivists promote unity and selflessness with work group goals above individual needs or desires. Hence, collectivists put emphasis on tradition, reciprocation of favors and sense of belonging while devaluing personal interests for the good of in-groups since relationships are important. Since being polythetic constructs, individualism and collectivism is described in four dimensions: horizontal individualism, vertical individualism, horizontal collectivism and vertical collectivism (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998). Horizontal individualists are characterized as independent and confident in their personal abilities, value their freedom, desire to be unique and respect other people’s opinions due to their strong belief in equality (Triandis, 1995). Likewise, vertical individualists treasure for their independence and individuality beside to advocating competition and seeking for social status (Yao, Wang, Dang & Wang, 2012). Within each cultural dimension, people exhibit unique cognitions, norms, self concepts, emotions and values (Powers, 2013). Since culture is transmitted to one generation to the next, the values and expectations of education are transmitted and reconstructed by student and teacher interactions in school settings (Frankel, Swanson & Sagan, 2005). Students coming from different cultural environments may have different norms and values; therefore, they may have different attitudes and tendencies towards any social object as regards cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects (Bilgin, 1995). Likewise, prospective teachers as students may show different thoughts, beliefs, behaviors and attitudes towards their profession due to the fact that prospective teachers as students have different norms and values with different cultural dimensions. However, how cultural dimension of individualism and collectivism is related to prospective teachers’ attitudes towards teaching profession is unclear and limited studies have been conducted. Given the previous discussion, this study aims to examine individualism and collectivism values of prospective teachers and their attitudes towards teaching profession. In this context, this study sought to determine whether prospective teachers’ cultural background is related to their attitudes towards teaching profession.

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