What does it look like when teachers ‘get better’ with technology integration?

What does it look like when teachers ‘get better’ with technology integration?

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A new article by PhD student Ralph Saubern, Daniel Urbach from the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Professor Matthew Koehler from Michigan State University and DER’s Mike Phillips have a new article in Computers and Education that describes increasing proficiency in teachers’ knowledge of the effective use of digital technologies.

Building on their earlier work, this paper describes the development of an empirically derived qualitative description of increasing proficiency in TPACK Confidence and TPACK Usefulness. Using the results of a partial credit Rasch analysis of survey responses, five bands of proficiency in TPACK Confidence and five bands of proficiency in TPACK usefulness are delineated and described. The study found that teachers at higher levels of TPACK proficiency more strongly believe in the value of using technology to facilitate deep thinking and learning and are more confident to use technology to support and facilitate deeper thinking and learning in and across curriculum areas than teachers with lower levels of proficiency. By providing a description of lower and higher proficiency and an inferred typical order of acquisition, the resulting construct maps can be used by researchers to help develop and test hypotheses about teachers’ acquisition of TPACK and improve the validity and precision of TPACK survey tools and by teacher educators to better understand and evaluate the TPACK of student teachers and inform the development of teacher education curricula.

Full access to the pre-print version of the article is available here and for a short time, the full article can be accessed here