Abstract
This article discusses the socio-academic characteristics of public high-school students in poverty contexts, who were selected by their teachers as potential good applicants to the pedagogical career, with aptitude or talent for pedagogy. The study is both descriptive and comparative. A questionnaire was applied to 585 students from 12 high-schools. At the same time, through discussion groups, teachers had previously identified 74 students with aptitude for pedagogy and 511 without such aptitude. The questionnaire collected information concerning sociodemographic data, academic performance and social participation from all students. Then, data were compared between the two groups through chi-square. The results show that students selected by their teachers have good school achievement level. There is no significant differences regarding gender, socioeconomic status or composition of the family group; however there are remarkable differences in attributes such as student leadership and social participation. The results also show that in-service teachers emphasize academic performance along with social and social participation leadership as aspects to be considered in order to select the best candidates for a pedagogical career. Based on the findings of this study, it could be noted that teachers saw all their selection categories as an integrated concept; they never selected potential pedagogy students by estimating personal attribute categories, academic skills, and social skills that taken as independent from each other.
Academic talent; Pedagogical skills; Teacher selection; Social participation