Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Technology-Integrating Knowledge and Skills

• In Event: Research on Factors Influencing Teachers’ Use of Information and Communication Technologies

Abstract

Meaningful use of ICT in education requires teachers to develop skills that enable them to integrate ICT with a suitable pedagogical approach for teaching specific subject matter. This knowledge is referred to as Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) (Koehler & Mishra, 2008). From previous studies (Albirini, 2006; Baylor & Ritchie, 2002; Knezek & Christensen, 2008) it is known that the factor attitude toward ICT is affecting its use in the classroom. This study focuses on measuring the perception of preservice teachers in using ICT in education, which we believe is closely related to their self-efficacy, to see whether this could be used in explaining their attitudes toward ICT and to recommendations toward the curriculum of teacher training programs. A recent study found that the instrument assesses what pre-service teachers think they know or what they can do, but not necessarily their real practice or knowledge level (Alayyar, Fisser, & Voogt). To determine pre-service teacher’s perceptions toward their knowledge and skills on ICT in education and attitudes toward ICT, the original Survey was translated in Dutch, and more items in relation to science education were added to make a science education-specific survey. It was distributed as a one-group, post-test only design among students from two different teacher training programs. 283 pre-service teachers responded. The reliability of all TPACK-items together gave a Cronbach’s α of .92. An exploratory factor analysis revealed six factors with eigenvalues larger than one and together explaining 58% of the variance.

First results indicate that the perception of the students on their ICT skills and knowledge is neutral, with TPACK Leadership as the weakest scoring factor. There is no significance difference in students from different study years, even though one might expect that more experienced pre-service teachers would have a higher score. Gender is influencing: men are more confident in their TK and see themselves more as leaders who help others to develop TPACK. The results indicate that work has to be done to raise the mean scores from neutral to positive. We believe that that the factor “TPACK leadership” will make the difference between an ICT-integrating teacher and a non-ICTintegrating teacher.

Authors

• Petra Fisser, Universiteit Twente

• Joke M. Voogt, Universiteit Twente

• Jo Tondeur, Ghent University

• Johan Van Braak, Ghent University