An empirical study exploring pre-service teachers’ profiles and their prospective ICT integration: is it a matter of attitudes, self-efficacy, self-concept or concerns?

Abstract

Empirical evidence has revealed that affective-motivational variables such as pre-service teachers’ attitudes, self-efficacy, self-concept and concerns play a key role in their pedagogical decisions regarding whether and how to integrate technology within their classroom practices. However, there is still little research on interaction between pre-service teachers’ affective-motivational variables and their resulting impact on their ICT integration. By means of hierarchical cluster analysis, this study examines the relationship between pre-service teachers’ internal variables of ICT attitudes, self-efficacy, self-concept and concerns and its resulting effect on their future ICT in-class integration. A total of 155 pre-service teachers in Germany participated voluntarily in the study. The results revealed two distinct and opposite pre-service teachers’ profiles based on the four internal variables explored: ICT attitudes, self-efficacy, self-concept and concerns. In addition, the findings reveal no significant associations between the teacher profiles, age, teaching programme (school track), and more interestingly, amongst gender. Lastly, the results also indicate that the two pre-service teacher clusters significantly differ in their prospective ICT integration. An in-depth discussion, limitations as well as practical implications are presented in the paper.