INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ TECHNOLOGICAL PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE AND WEB PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE BY STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING

The aim of this study is to examine the relations between the pre-service teachers’ self-perception of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and self-perception of web pedagogical content knowledge (WebPACK). On the respect of this aim, there has been constructed a structural equation model according to the literature reviews, and model was tested and examined for the goodness of fit indices. It is hoped that the findings of the study is going to give a general idea to the education implementers about the classroom applications of those variables; and lead the researchers about what has to be done for later studies.

This research is a correlational survey model. The research group of this study was 453 education faculty students at the beginning of the research. Because of the assumptions of the applied statistical method, structural equation modeling, the number of research group decreased to 342. As data collection tools, WebPACK Scale which is adapted to Turkish by Horzum (2011) and TPACK Scale which is adapted to Turkish by Şahin (2011) were used. To examine the relations between the variables, before the main analysis of the structural equation modeling, the assumptions of the analysis were checked by using SPSS 20.0 computer program. After all the assumptions were met, the main analysis to evaluate the constructed model was done by using LISREL 8.7 computer program.

Findings of the research shows that TPACK effects WebPACK positively and TPACK explains 31% of the variance in WebPACK. When TPACK and the path coefficients of other factors examines, the highest coefficient is found as .93 with the factor of technological content knowledge. When WebPACK and the path coefficients of other factors examines, the highest coefficient is found as .87 with the factor of pedagogical web knowledge. In addition, all t-values belongs to path coefficients of the model were found as significant (p<.05), so there was no need to do any modification about the paths in the model. The modification indices of the model shows that the model has high goodness of fit indices. At the end of this study, the results show that in the area of education in order to increase the web pedagogic content knowledge perception of teacher candidates in a positive way, pre-service education need to be supported with more technology integrated pedagogical content knowledge courses.