Summary of a Journal Related to TPACK #2

Analysis of Relationships between Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge  and Educational Internet Use

Ismail Sahin (Necmettin Erbakan University), Ismail Celik & Ahmet Oguz Akturk (Selcuk University), Mustafa Aydin (Necmettin Erbakan University)

            There are some basic skills teachers and pre-service teachers should have including general culture, special area education, and pedagogy knowledge to be successful in their subject areas. To accomplish this, teachers and teacher candidates should use information and communication technologies better to follow developments in their content areas, transfer contemporary approaches and teaching methods to their practices, and increase their level of knowledge in general culture. For teachers, technology is vital to develop their knowledge both in their areas of expertise and in pedagogy and general culture. For this reason, teachers should be able to integrate their knowledge in content, technology, and pedagogy successfully.

In this study, the writers used the TPACK model as the theoretical framework in the process of data collection and interpretation of the results. They conducted the study in a college of education at a large Turkish university in central Anatolia with the population of 8 departments. They distributed the survey to randomly selected students from these departments. Thus, the participants of this research study included 163 pre-service teachers. Of these participants, 91 (56%) were female and 72 (44%) were male. The participants received training on technology integration as part of their classes. In collecting the data, the writers used two research instruments. The first is a 28 items of Survey of Self-efficacy in Educational Internet Use while the second is a 47 items of Survey of Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge.

In the present study, the writers used descriptive statistics and correlation analysis to report relationships among the variables. They used the canonical correlation analysis method to determine the relationships between the level of knowledge for each domain of the TPACK model and the self-efficacy beliefs in educational Internet use. They also used Wilks’ lambda, a multivariate statistic ranging between 0 and 1 (Mertler & Vannatta, 2002), to test the significance of the relationship between the sets of variables. Using multiple linear regression analysis, they tested the relationships between the dependent variable, educational Internet use, and the following seven predictor variables: TK, PK, CK, TPK, TCK, PCK, and TPACK.

From the study, it is found that teachers who understand TPACK will have higher self-efficacy toward Internet use and therefore better integration habits around using the Internet. In this study, it is found that technology, content, and technological content knowledge domains are statistically significant predictors of pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in educational Internet use.