The digital silver lining of the pandemic: The impact on preservice teachers’ technological knowledge and beliefs

Abstract

COVID-19 drastically disrupted teaching and learning worldwide and across all educational levels. Technology took on a central role in redefining education under these exceptional circumstances and frequently revealed challenges related to both infrastructure and to teachers’ and learners’ technological skills and readiness. This study aimed to investigate whether the experience of emergency remote education significantly impacted preservice teachers’ knowledge and beliefs for their future teaching with technology. We investigated three cohorts of preservice teachers (pre-lockdown, n = 179; during lockdown, n = 48; post-lockdown, n = 228) and explored differences in their self-reported technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and their technological beliefs. Findings showed positive effects in the post-lockdown cohort, reflected in higher levels of technological knowledge (TK) and technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) compared to the pre-lockdown cohort. In addition, unique positive effects on content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) were found in the post-lockdown cohort among preservice teachers with prior teaching experiences. No effects of either cohort or experience emerged for preservice teachers’ technological beliefs. These findings indicate that, despite the challenges related to COVID-19 lockdowns, preservice teachers not only appear to have maintained positive beliefs towards technology but may have even been able to draw benefits from the experience of lockdown. These findings and the positive effects associated with teaching experience are discussed with regard to their implication for teacher education.

Towards an Integrated Perspective of Teachers’ Technology Integration: A Preliminary Model and Future Research Directions

“…Instead, TPACK may be spontaneously constructed on the fly by integrating separated knowledge structures during the act of technology integration. Relatedly, in addition to these developmental processes, Mishra (2019) proposed a contextual knowledge component which highlights situational knowledge about the instructional context Brianza et al, 2022;Dishon, 2022;Lachner et al, 2019;Turner & Meyer, 2000), such as knowledge about how a school is functioning, or how organisational change can be enhanced to realise technology integration (see Angeli & Valanides, 2009, for related concepts).…”