Auditing the TPACK Capabilities of Final Year Teacher Education Students: Are they ready for the 21st century?

Abstract

The expectations for teacher education graduates having appropriate information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities to meet the challenges of learning and teaching in the 21st century are widely accepted. However, it should not be assumed that tomorrow's teachers will enter their profession with those ICT capabilities. The conceptual framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, AACTE Committee on Innovation and Technology, 2008) was used to guide the study undertaken in 2009 of final year students in two Universities in Queensland, Australia. The findings are compared with those reported in an earlier study (Watson et al., 2004) which found that there was a limited band of applications with which the participants expressed high levels of competence. Importantly, high percentages of participants perceived themselves to have no competence with applications such as multimedia development, visual thinking software and digital video editing which could be particularly stimulating for learning outcomes in their future students. Furthermore, participants' self-perception of their confidence to integrate ICT into student learning also revealed that the percentage of participants who rated themselves as having no or limited confidence with particular integration examples was of concern. This paper provides a summary of some of the findings of the TPACK capabilities of the student teachers studied in 2009, which reveal important insights to inform the review and design of teacher education programs to more directly address TPACK capabilities. The study suggests that teacher education programs tend to have been designed using Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) (Shulman, 1986, 1987) where students undertake studies in a range of curriculum (content, disciplinary) courses, pedagogy courses, and professional studies (practicum, Internship) courses, and this is now insufficient as TPACK capabilities are needed.