Integrating ICT into Teacher Education Programs from a TPACK Perspective: Exploring Perceptions of University Lecturers (A Summary)

Hello everyone,

This time, I read a paper entitled Integrating ICT into Teacher Education Programs from a TPACK Perspective: Exploring Perceptions of University Lecturers written by Vicente Chua Reyes Jr., Christine Reading, Helen Doyle and Sue Gregory. Three of the writers has an affiliation with University of New England and one of the writers has an affiliation with University of Queensland. The paper was submitted for Computers and Education: An International Journal (Elsevier) in 2017 and can be assessed in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.07.009. 

The paper was an exploratory research of how lecturers in Australian university perceive the impact of TPACK in their teaching practice. The research reported in the research was conducted in 2010 and 2011. There were about 20% university students enrolled on-campus study and 80% off-campus. To be detailed, there were about 14.84% and 13.74% students who enrolled off-campus in 2010 and 2011 respectively. 

There was some previous research about TPACK that influence this research. One of them was conducted by Koh et al (2010) and it was about analyzing pre-service teachers' perception of technology and pedagogy interaction in a Singaporean context. The other was analyzing by proposing the notion of ICT-TPACK while empirically testing variants of the model on pre-service teachers in a European context (Angeli and Valanides, 2009). Graham (2009) also conducted a research on TPACK to measure the levels of confidence before and after participation in a professional development program. Recently, Reyes et al (2016) found out a blurred image of TPACK amongst the pre-service teachers of science. Graham also mentioned that TPACK suffers from conceptual complexity (2011, p.1955).

The participants of the research were university lecturers in the Australian Regional Universities who have multiple roles as unit coordinator several times in different subjects. The researchers used a faced-to-faced interview to gather the data from respondents and survey.  There were 9 of the items used to coding the data and those variables are grouped into two, namely targeted level for the course and predominant mode of teaching implemented for the course. 

To collect and analyze the data, the researchers used cluster analysis to perform data reduction with the end of identifying natural groupings within a large set.  The researchers also used two-step cluster analysis and SPSS as a tool to explore the collected data. To find out the differences among the three identified clusters, the researchers used ANOVA. There is some discussion and those are how teacher educators use ICT (1), ICT use contextualized in the curriculum (2), ICT strategies used to support the pedagogy (3), ICT used as part of the assessment process (4), ICT tools provided as part of the resources (5), how teacher educators teach with ICT (6), teaching about ICT (7), teaching about ICT relevant to specific content (8), teaching about the affordances of using ICT to support pedagogy (9), and tehorising clusters of teacher-educators who "use" and "teach" about ICT (10).

The analysis of the research focused on the role of university lecturers as unit coordinators. The result of the research suggested that it is worthwhile to listen to and discover more about teachers with whom we will work before we collaborate with them. It was also found that 2011 TTF reform initiative, technology engagement has been subsumed under TPACK skills that expert teachers of the 21st century would need to possess. It also discovered that several layers of technology policy disconnect with respect to the theme of ICT use and ICT teaching of university lecturers.