A Review of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Summary

Hi everyone, hope you all are doing well.

This time, I am going to write a summary from a paper entitled a review of technological pedagogical content knowledge written by Ching Sing Chai, Joyce Hwee Ling Koh and Chin-Chung Tsai who have an affiliation with Nanyang Technological University, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. The paper was submitted for Educational Technology and Society in 2013.

They started with identifying the literature in May 2011 by exploring the web of science database and used TPACK or TPCK and technological pedagogical content knowledge as the keywords.  As a result, they found 40 articles. Next, they did further searching by using education research complete and ERIC and found 75 journals articles. After eliminating duplicates, there were 74 articles were read, analyzed and coded using a spreadsheet program.

The researchers adapted systematic approach to code the data and categorized the articles into four categories as follow basic data, research methods, content analysis, and discussion. The result of the findings was presented in three main sections and those were basic data analysis, research methods analysis, and content analysis. Finding from the basic data analyses covered general publication trend, site of studies, and types of journal. Findings from the research method analyses covered the classification of the paper, such as theoretical paper, worked example, and editorial paper. Last is about findings from content analyses.

The reviewed journals were from different articles and those were from educational technology journal, cross-discipline journal, subject-based journal, pedagogy journals and teacher education journal. From the distribution, it can be seen that TPACK framework is more readily accepted by education technologist rather than a content specialist. In theoretical papers under findings from the research method analyses, there were 9 theoretical papers about TPACK relevance, 9 papers worked example about applying TPACK in an institutional setting, and ICT integration as editorial paper or non-empirical paper.

Based on the reviewed papers, there were 3 types of research approaches (qualitative, quantitative, and mixed), and 7 research methods. The research methods covered artifact evaluation, software development, case study, intervention study, document analysis, survey study, and instrument validation. Among many papers, there were only one document analyses that employ TPACK framework. To validate the instrument, there were five studies to validate of self-report surveys. Both surveys showed that it has good reliability coefficients. However, it was not considered as fully validated.

The paper used foundational dimensions of TPACK framework to analyze the articles and those are content, technology, and pedagogy. Based on the literature review, the researchers identified four interdependent contextual factors, intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions. In short, the researchers wanted to point out the possibility of knowledge of cross-discipline.