Machine Learning Reveals Three Ethical Profiles Among Future Teachers in Spain and Mexico

A sweeping study of more than 1,100 aspiring teachers in Spain and Mexico has found that future educators do not arrive at the profession with uniform ethical commitments. Instead, researchers identified three distinct ethical-professional profiles among undergraduate education students, ranging from strongly endorsed professional values to a small but striking group with markedly lower endorsement across every dimension measured. The findings, published in the open-access journal Heliyon, challenge the long-standing assumption that teacher education is inherently ethical and suggest that professional ethics must be deliberately taught rather than passively absorbed.

The research team, led by Juan Miguel Salazar-Partida, Antonio Burgos-García, Mónica Márquez-Pinedo, and Purificación Pérez-García, surveyed 1,117 students enrolled in undergraduate teacher education programs. Of these, 816 were studying at eight Spanish universities affiliated with Andalusian institutions including the Universidad de Granada and Universidad de Sevilla, while 301 were enrolled at the Universidad de Guadalajara and the Escuela Normal Superior de Jalisco in Mexico. Most participants were women, reflecting the well-documented feminization of the teaching workforce, and roughly two-thirds were between 17 and 20 years old. Students came from Early Childhood, Primary, General, Indigenous, and Secondary Education degree tracks, and about 58 percent reported an urban background.

To capture the ethical dimension of professional formation, the researchers used a 49-item questionnaire assessing professional teaching ethics across six analytical axes: teaching vocation, personal-professional principles, ethical commitment to teaching, responsibility for student training, ethics as an evaluative component, and processes for evaluating teaching ethics. Responses were recorded on a four-point Likert-type scale. The instrument demonstrated strong psychometric properties, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .859 to .946 across the six axes and reaching .969 for the full questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis conducted on a subsample of 818 participants produced favorable fit indices, including a Comparative Fit Index of .959 and a root mean square error of approximation of .038, supporting the six-factor structure used in subsequent analyses.

The methodological heart of the study lies in its dual use of unsupervised machine learning. Rather than relying on a single clustering technique, the team applied both K-Means and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) to standardized scores across the six axes. K-Means partitions data by minimizing distances to cluster centroids, while GMM allows for more flexible, probabilistically overlapping groupings by modeling the data as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Candidate solutions with two to six clusters were compared using internal validation indices such as the Silhouette coefficient, the Calinski-Harabasz index, the Davies-Bouldin index, and the Dunn index for K-Means, and the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria for GMM. Because the validation criteria did not converge on a single best solution, the researchers retained a three-cluster solution as a descriptive representation, acknowledging a two-cluster alternative as plausible.

The resulting profiles followed a consistent ordinal pattern in both approaches. The higher-endorsement profile, comprising 855 participants under K-Means and 497 under GMM, showed positive standardized means across all six axes, with the strongest scores appearing in evaluative dimensions of teaching ethics. The moderate-endorsement profile occupied an intermediate position, with slightly negative scores under K-Means and a more nuanced mixed pattern under GMM, where vocation and personal-professional principles were marginally positive while evaluative components were slightly negative. A lower-endorsement configuration also emerged in both solutions, though with important caveats: under K-Means it contained only 13 participants, or about 1.2 percent of the sample, and its recovery across resampling analyses was inconsistent, leading the authors to treat it as an exploratory low-prevalence response pattern rather than a stable population subgroup.

Stability testing reinforced this caution. The K-Means solution showed high agreement across repeated 80 percent subsamples, with a mean Adjusted Rand Index of .956, but greater sensitivity to initialization. The GMM solution proved remarkably stable, with a mean Adjusted Rand Index of .997 across repeated initializations, although it became more sensitive as covariance regularization increased. Dimensionality-reduction visualizations using t-SNE and principal component analysis, the latter explaining 83.6 percent of the variance in two dimensions, provided descriptive confirmation of the ordered but overlapping structure of the profiles. The authors emphasize that these visualizations serve as interpretive aids rather than formal validation criteria.

Beyond the profiles themselves, the study examined whether membership varied across sociodemographic, academic, and institutional characteristics using chi-square tests with Cramér’s V as a measure of association, corrected for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate procedure. Five contextual variables emerged as significant in both clustering approaches: gender, Indigenous-group membership, degree program, institution, and country. Access grade was significant only under K-Means, while academic year was significant only under GMM. Age group, urban or rural environment, and high-school type showed no significant associations in either solution. The authors stress that these are exploratory associations, not causal determinants, but they suggest that ethical-professional orientations are shaped, at least in part, by the educational and sociocultural contexts in which future teachers are trained.

The findings arrive at a moment of renewed international attention to teacher ethics. Earlier surveys of higher education found that only about 9 percent of teacher education curricula included courses with professional ethics content, a figure that underscored how often ethics has been marginalized in favor of subject instruction and pedagogical technique. The past several years have seen a counter-movement, marked by the publication of major handbooks on teacher ethos and values education and by systematic reviews of ethics in teacher preparation. The present study adds empirical weight to that shift by showing that ethical-professional dispositions vary measurably among students entering the profession, and that this variation cannot be assumed away by the belief that teaching attracts people who are good by nature.

The researchers frame their contribution within an applied, relational understanding of professional teaching ethics, drawing on the Ibero-American tradition of ética profesional docente and the framework of Torquemada and Loredo. Within this view, ethics is expressed not only in abstract moral reasoning but in vocational orientation, respectful conduct, professional commitment, responsibility toward students, and openness to evaluation. The identified profiles, the authors argue, are not moral classifications of individual students but empirical configurations of self-reported values, dispositions, attitudes, and commitments. This distinction matters: the study did not directly assess ethical reasoning, moral judgment, or observed conduct, and its cross-sectional, self-report design precludes causal or developmental conclusions.

The practical implications are nonetheless significant. If roughly a quarter to nearly half of future teachers, depending on the clustering method, fall into moderate or lower-endorsement profiles, then teacher education programs cannot treat ethics as an incidental by-product of training. The authors call for explicit, structured integration of ethical content into initial teacher education, grounded in the sociocultural realities of professional practice and attentive to the diversity of students’ starting points. They also point toward future research using longitudinal designs, qualitative interviews, and extensions linking professional ethics to deontological standards and competence-based frameworks for civic and democratic participation. As education systems worldwide grapple with teacher shortages, quality, and public trust, this study offers a data-driven reminder that the ethical formation of teachers is not automatic, and that building it deliberately may be one of the most consequential investments a teacher education program can make.

Subject of Research: Ethical-professional profiles of prospective teachers in undergraduate education degree programs in Spain and Mexico

Article Title: Analysis of professional teaching ethics among prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs

Article References: Salazar-Partida, J. M., Burgos-García, A., Márquez-Pinedo, M., & Pérez-García, P. (2026). Analysis of professional teaching ethics among prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45525. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45525

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45525

Keywords: teacher ethics, prospective teachers, teacher education, K-Means clustering, Gaussian Mixture Models, professional values, teaching vocation, ethical commitment, Spain, Mexico, Heliyon, machine learning