Abstract:

In order to facilitate for student teachers to structure their teaching with digital tools and to study their technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK), we used a pedagogical tool, titled technological content representation (T-CoRe). The T-CoRe is designed as a tool to enable student teachers to prepare for integration of digital technology in their teaching and to reflect on their use of this technology when teaching a specific subject matter. The T-CoRe asks explicit questions about which digital tools they are going to use, their reasons for using these tools and which opportunities the use of these digital tools can provide to facilitate the students’ understanding of a specific subject content.

The aim of this study was to investigate how student teachers’ express their knowledge of use of digital technology in the TPACK framework when reflecting on their video-recorded teaching with use of the T-CoRe.

The study included 27 secondary science student teachers following a two-year teacher education programme. The student teachers’ T-CoRes, their annotated video clips and their written reflections were analysed with a qualitative content analysis.

Most of the student teachers’ (18), exhibited an integrated knowledge of the technology dependent domains; TK, TPK and TCK, in the TPACK framework. For nine of the student teachers, only their TK and TPK could be observed.

In our study TKC was observed in a rather high frequency (for 18 out of 27 student teachers) compared to other studies (e.g., Hsu, 2012; K. Swan & Hofer, 2011) that have not been able to observe the knowledge domain of TCK in pre-service teachers TPACK development. The results indicate that the T-CoRe might provide a fruitful framework for supporting student teachers’ in their planning of teaching with digital technology and their self-reflection on their use of digital tools in their teaching. Thus, our study proposes a structure for teacher education that might work to improve how student teachers’ are prepared for using digital technology in a learning contexts within their own teacher preparation program and, ultimately, in their future classrooms. The study suggests that the T-CoRe with its explicit requests to express ideas around the use of digital technology in their teaching was the main reason for the student teachers’ ability to reach their TPACK.

Keywords:

Digital technology, science teaching, teacher education, TPAC, technologycontent representation.