A Comparative Study Of Preservice And Inservice English Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Building on Shulman’s idea of pedagogical content knowledge, Mishra and Koehler in2006first proposedthe framework of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK), which is a term used to describewhat teachers need to know to effectively integrate technology into their teaching practices. The frameworkprovides guidance for professional development and trainings for inservice and preservice teachers. The studiesfor the TPACK framework have become important topics for teachers’ professional development abroad.However, there are relatively few studies of TPACK at home. The present study, inspired by the studies ofTPACK abroad, by means of quantitative and qualitative methodology, which is guided by the TPACK model,sets out to investigate the present situation of preservice and inservice high English teachers’ TPACK and toexamine the underlying relationship between English teachers’ TPACK constructs and their TPACK. It alsoaims to draw out the differences and similarities of preservice and inservice high English teachers’ TPACK andgive some suggestions on how to improve preservice and inservice English teachers’ TPACK.This thesis first gives a brief introduction, which illustrates the research background, research significance,research objectives, and layout of the study and concerns itself with the literature review of some relative studiesof TPACK both abroad and at home. Next it presents the theoretical framework of the present study, includingconstructivist teaching theory in ICT education, TPACK framework, and the contexts of TPACK framework.Then the present study, based on teachers’ technological pedagogical content survey designed by Schmidt in2009, designed English teachers’ technological pedagogical and content survey. The reliability of the survey wasconfirmed after conducting Cornbach alpha analysis. The study, taking100high school English teachers inLanzhou and100postgraduates majoring in English Course and Teaching Studies from Northwest NormalUniversity as subjects, collected the data from the questionnaire. Finally, the researcher first preliminarily sortedout the original data with SPSS18.0and removed the missing values in the survey. Afterwards, structuralequation models were built through AMOS7.0based on the factors in the TPACK survey in order to determinethe relationship between TPACK constructs and teachers’ TPACK.The results are enumerated as follows:1) Inservice English teachers’ TPACK level is high (M=4.03), whichis highest in relation to the dimension of PCK and lowest of TCK. Preservice English teachers’ TPACK level isrelatively low (M=3.47), which is strongest in relation to the dimension of CK and weakest of TK.2) Structuralequation analysis shows that teachers’ TPACK are mainly influenced by TPACK constructs. For inserviceteachers, the TPACK factors order of influential ability from strong to weak is that TK, TPK, TCK, PCK, PK,CK. For preservice English teachers, the TPACK factors order of influential ability from strong to weak is that PK, CK, TK, PCK, TPK, TCK.3) By making a comparative analysis of the path diagram of the impact ofTPACK constructs on preservice and inservice English teachers’ TPACK, the differences between preserviceand inservice English teachers’ TPACK is that the six components of TPACK have different path influences onpreservice and inservice English teachers’ TPACK. For inservice English teachers, PK and TK have the largestindirect impact on inservice English teachers’ TPACK compared with the indirect impact of CK on inserviceEnglish teachers’ TPACK. Compared with the indirect impact of CK and TK on preservice English teachers’TPACK, PK has the most significant indirect impact on preservice teachers’ TPACK.