Abstract:

Background:
It has been criticized that teacher education training does not bridge the gap between theory and practice. In most cases, pre-service teachers are unsure how to incorporate teacher knowledge (i.e., content, pedagogical, and technological knowledge) into their microteaching plans, and they need more practice to fully integrate this knowledge. Thus, this study investigates pre-service teachers’ design disposition, self-efficacy to design microteaching plans, design-thinking engagement, and vitality. The research question was: How do pre-service teachers’ disposition toward design, self-efficacy for designing microteaching, and design-thinking engagement relate to their design vitality?

Participants:
Participants were 136 pre-service teachers who took the teacher training program and participated voluntarily in this study at a national university in Taiwan. They completed the survey at the end of the 18-week curriculum and instructional design courses.

Instrument and data analysis:
Design disposition investigates pre-service teachers' feelings toward ambiguous, uncertain, and conflicting ideas. Self-efficacy for design microteaching examines an individual's confidence in his or her abilities to cope with design challenges. Design-thinking activities investigate their perceptions when they identify learning objectives, generate teaching ideas, design integrative learning activities, and revise based on students’ needs. Vitality measures an individual’s feeling of energy and excitement when they meet design challenges. All items were scored on a 5-point Likert scale (i.e., 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). The instruments were adapted from the author’s previously published article in 2021. An exploratory factor analysis was employed to clarify the structure. The item factor loadings ranged from 0.64 to 0.94, with a total of 72.21% variance explained. The Cronbach’s alpha values for each construct were from 0.81 to 0.91, reflecting satisfactory reliability and validity for statistical analysis.

Results:
Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the relationships between these factors. The results showed that these factors were significantly and positively related (from r = 0.32 to r = 0.70). Next, a linear regression analysis was conducted to build a model for predicting pre-service teachers' vitality. The results showed that design disposition (β = 0.17, p < 0.05), self-efficacy for designing (β = 0.32, p < 0.01), and design-thinking engagement (β = 0.30, p < 0.01) played significant roles in affecting pre-service teachers' vitality.

Discussions:
Design is recognized as a routine part of a teacher’s work, which entails the design preparation of deciding what content to cover, how content should be presented, what learning activities students should engage in, which technologies could support these activities, and how learning should be assessed. To become adaptive expert teachers, pre-service teachers need to learn more design practices. This study explores the relations among individual design traits, design engagement, efficacy for designing, and vitality. In conclusion, these findings suggest that pre-service teachers' disposition toward design indicates that when they feel comfortable with design challenges that they have not experienced before, they may respond with confidence and engage in design-thinking activities to overcome them with vitality and energy.

Keywords:

Teacher education, pre-service teacher, design-thinking engagement, disposition, self-efficacy, vitality.