Technology is recognized for its potential to implement exploration tasks. The ease and speed with which it becomes possible to observe many cases of a situation, allows the development of ...conjectures and brings conviction about their veracity. Mathematical proof, assumed as the essence of Mathematics, tends to appear to the students as something dispensable. Based on KTMT – Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics with Technology model, this study intends to understand the impact of the teachers’ knowledge on mathematical proof in a context of technology integration. The study adopts a qualitative and interpretative methodology, based on case study, analyzing the practice of one teacher. The conclusions emphasize the relevance of the teacher’s MTK – Mathematics and Technology Knowledge, and TLTK – Teaching and Learning and Technology Knowledge. The teacher's MTK guides her decisions, leading her to focus on helping students understand the meaning of conjecture and proof, valuing, at the same time, the relevance of algebraic manipulations. However, the teacher’s TLTK guides her practice, where the knowledge about the students is determinant. The study provides evidence about the difficulty of articulating proof and technology, but it also clarifies the relevance of this articulation and of how the teacher’s KTMT can impact the teacher’s decisions.
Applying professional-vision skills to classroom situations depends on knowledge about what matters in these situations. In an experiment with 85 biology pre-service teachers, we investigated a ...90-min intervention combining both acquisition and application of knowledge about tutoring. The intervention started with an introductory text, followed by classroom video examples. Students who read a text on concrete tutoring strategies made more references to pedagogical concepts in their analyses than students who read about generic video observational guidelines. We conclude that combining a short, focused theoretical introduction and video analysis is a promising method to broadly anchor professional-vision training within teacher education.
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•Effects of an initial intervention session on pre-service teachers' professional vision.•Pretraining improves the quality of subsequent observation of classroom videos.•Pretraining raises situational interest in video analysis tasks.
This study was situated in a Primary Teacher Education program in the Netherlands. The participants (N=16) comprised four each of: Pre-Service Teachers (PST); Mentor Teachers; School-Based Teacher ...Educators; and University-Based Teacher Educators. Video-recordings of four mentoring conversations for each PST which transcribed and translated for analysis. A mixed methodology was applied with analysis based on examining mentoring conversations in relation to the MERID-model through turn-taking analysis and Propositional Discourse Analysis. The study illustrates that mentors tend to use a more directive mentoring approach and that they dominate dialogue suggesting that there is aneed for reconsideration of the mentor-PST learning relationship and how it is understood in teacher education.
•Mentoring roles are influential to the kind of knowledge PSTs acquire.•Summarizing and questioning lead PSTs to the elicitation of practical knowledge.•The encourager role improves PSTs' learning of generalized knowledge of practice.•The imperator role leads to situation-specific knowledge development of PSTs.
In an expertise study with 94 mathematics teachers varying in their relative teacher expertise (i.e., student teachers, trainee teachers, in-service teachers), we examined effects of teachers' ...professional knowledge and motivational beliefs on their ability to integrate technology within a lesson plan scenario. Therefore, we assessed teachers' professional knowledge (i.e., content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, technological knowledge), and their motivational beliefs (i.e., self-efficacy, utility-value). Furthermore, teachers were asked to develop a lesson plan for introducing the Pythagorean theorem to secondary students. Lesson plans by advanced teachers (i.e., trainee teachers, in-service teachers) comprised higher levels of instructional quality and technology exploitation than the ones of novice teachers (i.e., pre-service teachers). The effect of expertise was mediated by teachers' perceived utility-value of educational technology, but not by their professional knowledge. These findings suggest that teachers’ motivational beliefs play a crucial role for effectively applying technology in mathematics instruction.
•We examined effects of relative teacher expertise on the quality of technology-integration.•We used lesson plans to measure the quality of technology integration.•Relative teacher expertise accounted for quality of lesson plans.•Teachers utility-value mediated the relative teacher expertise effect.
•Addressed young children’s online learning during the pandemic.•Added new understanding of parents’ beliefs and attitudes around online learning.•Identified challenges and issues in promoting online ...learning during COVID-19.
Online learning has been widely promoted to replace traditional face-to-face learning during the COVID-19 pandemic to maintain young children’s learning and play at home. This study surveyed 3275 Chinese parents’ beliefs and attitudes around young children’s online learning during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most parents (92.7%) in the study reported that their children had online learning experiences during the pandemic, and many (84.6%) spent less than a half-hour each time. The parents generally had negative beliefs about the values and benefits of online learning and preferred traditional learning in early childhood settings. They tended to resist and even reject online learning for three key reasons: the shortcomings of online learning, young children’s inadequate self-regulation, and their lack of time and professional knowledge in supporting children’s online learning. Also, the hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has made them suffering, thus more resistant to online learning at home. The results suggested that the implementation of online learning during the pandemic has been problematic and challenging for families. The Chinese parents were neither trained nor ready to embrace online learning. The paper concluded with implications for policymakers and teacher education.
Against the backdrop of digitalization, it is imperative to provide pre-service teachers with adequate training opportunities to foster their professional knowledge regarding technology integration ...in teaching-learning scenarios. However, to date, only limited insights into the empirical nature of such knowledge – often subsumed under the term Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (i.e., TPCK) – are possible given the heterogeneity of prior research investigating the empirical relationship between different knowledge components. This heterogeneity is likely due to the predominant use of self-reports in previous studies. Against this background, the present study pursued two goals. The first goal was to investigate the empirical nature of TPCK among pre-service teachers, utilizing test-based instruments to explore TPCK's nature from a subject-specific angle, that is, its relationship with Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Technological Knowledge (TK). Given the widespread use of self-reports, the study's second goal was to examine the relationship between test-based and self-reported TPCK, exploring possible associated factors (e.g., pre-service teachers' gender, prior experience in teaching with technologies in school, or metacognitive accuracy) that may explain why both measures are linked only weakly. Findings reveal that both PCK and TK statistically predicted TPCK to a similar extent highlighting the integrated nature of TPCK. The relationship between test-based and self-reported TPCK was moderated by pre-service teachers' metacognitive accuracy, but not by their gender or prior experience. Together, these insights offer valuable guidance for refining teacher training regarding effective technology integration by indicating the need to target not only PCK and TK but also TPCK.
•Exploring the connection of TPCK with TK and PCK in pre-service math teachers.•Results were based on subject-specific, test-based instruments.•TK and PCK equally contributed to TPCK highlighting TPCK's integrated nature.•Self-reported TPCK and test-based TPCK were only related weakly.•Pre-service teachers' metacognitive accuracy moderated this relationship.
Against the backdrop of preparing students for a digitalized future, supporting pre-service teachers' development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has become paramount in ...pre-service teacher education. Whether and how pre-service teachers' acquisition of TPACK could be supported is still an open question, as previous research predominantly relied on correlational data and/or self-report assessments. Based on previous research, we developed subject-specific versions of a TPACK-module to support the acquisition of TPACK. Further purpose of the TPACK-module was to enhance technology-related motivation, as motivational orientations have been documented to be crucial for technology integration. We evaluated the effectiveness of the module by means of a quasi-experimental field study. Pre-service teachers (N = 208), enrolled in five subjects, attended regular semester courses on subject-matter pedagogies. In half of the courses, we randomly implemented subject-specific TPACK-modules (duration: three weeks), in which pre-service teachers were taught in using technology for subject-matter teaching, whereas the control condition attended the regular courses without the TPACK-module. We found that pre-service teachers in the courses with the TPACK-modules acquired more TPACK than those in the control courses without the TPACK-modules. Significant effects were also obtained for pre-service teachers' technology-related self-efficacy and their perceived support for technology integration. The effectiveness of the TPACK-modules could be explained by the obtained support for technology integration. The findings highlight the central need of adequate support for pre-service teachers’ development of technology-related professional knowledge and motivation in teacher education programs.
•We developed a subject-specific intervention to foster pre-service teachers' TPACK.•The intervention was based on evidence-based practices of teacher education.•Effects were tested in a cluster randomized study in 5 subjects across three weeks.•TPACK was measured by test-based instruments.•Effects were obtained for TPACK, self-efficacy, and subjective support.
Organizational decision-makers need to evaluate AI tools in light of increasing claims that such tools out-perform human experts. Yet, measuring the quality of knowledge work is challenging, raising ...the question of how to evaluate AI performance in such contexts. We investigate this question through a field study of a major U.S. hospital, observing how managers evaluated five different machine-learning (ML) based AI tools. Each tool reported high performance according to standard AI accuracy measures, which were based on ground truth labels provided by qualified experts. Trying these tools out in practice, however, revealed that none of them met expectations. Searching for explanations, managers began confronting the high uncertainty of experts’ know-what knowledge captured in ground truth labels used to train and validate ML models. In practice, experts address this uncertainty by drawing on rich know-how practices, which were not incorporated into these ML-based tools. Discovering the disconnect between AI’s know-what and experts’ know-how enabled managers to better understand the risks and benefits of each tool. This study shows dangers of treating ground truth labels used in ML models objectively when the underlying knowledge is uncertain. We outline implications of our study for developing, training, and evaluating AI for knowledge work.
Teachers' technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) is regarded as a critical prerequisite to effectively use technology during teaching across content domains. Previous findings on the availability ...of TPK, and its relation to other corresponding components of teachers' professional knowledge, however, were relatively mixed, probably because previous research most exclusively relied on indirect measures, such as self-reports of teacher knowledge. By applying a newly developed test-based instrument to assess teachers' conceptual and situational TPK, we investigated the cognitive conditions accounting for the availability of TPK. In Study 1 (N = 284), we demonstrated that the availability of TPK depended on the level of teacher expertise. In Study 2 (N = 120), we examined the connectedness of TPK to its corresponding knowledge components (i.e., technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge). We showed that teachers’ TPK was only related to their pedagogical knowledge. The findings demonstrate that pedagogical expertise is a crucial prerequisite for TPK, which enables teachers to judge the potentials of technologies for varying teaching situations.
•We present a theory-based and feasible approach of TPK assessment.•The TPK test comprised conceptual TPK and situational TPK.•Situational TPK was predicted by expertise and conceptual TPK.•PK, but not TK, was directly related to conceptual and situational TPK.
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