Twenty-first century skills have attracted significant attention in recent years. Student of today and the future are expected to have the skills necessary for collaborating, problem solving, creative and innovative thinking, and the ability to take advantage of information and communication technology (ICT) applications. Teachers must be familiar with various pedagogical approaches and the appropriate ways to use ICT to support the development of their students' twenty-first century skills. The technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework provides a theoretical model for studying the ways in which teachers use ICT in education. Still, the TPACK framework faces certain difficulties, especially concerning the instruments currently used for studying TPACK. These challenges are primarily related to the psychometric properties of the instruments and areas of pedagogical knowledge. Within this paper we introduce a new TPACK questionnaire, the TPACK-21 questionnaire which is grounded on twenty-first century skills. The TPACK-21 questionnaire is validated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results provide a six factor CFA model aligning with the TPACK theoretical framework. Also, the associations among TPACK sub-constructs, and the weak and strong areas of pre-service teachers' TPACK will be discussed.
The aim of this paper is to provide insights into differences between pre-service teachers based on the areas of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and the areas of theory of planned behaviour (TPB) in the context of using information and communication technology in education. The target group consisted of 267 first-year pre-service teachers at 3 Finnish universities. Differences between pre-service teachers were outlined using cluster analysis based on their knowledge of different TPACK areas (the respondents' weak and strong areas). To see how the TPB areas aligned with the 4 TPACK clusters, 1-way analysis of variance was used. Statistically significant differences between the 4 clusters were found in all the TPB areas except subjective norms. These results provide insights into the differences among pre-service teachers in the context of TPACK and the TPB. They also suggest that instead of considering pre-service teachers as one homogenous group, we need to understand the variations among their abilities and knowledge in order to be able to provide them with support they need within teacher education.
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