Using digital tools in teacher education for fostering instructional competence among (pre-service) teachers

Abstract

Teachers’ instructional competence to integrate information and communication technology into the classroom has become essential. However, teachers often lack the disposition to put these corresponding demands into practice. Recent research proposes that the use of (digital) learning tools in teacher education can help to promote the required content-specific and generic dispositions at an early stage. Following the critical discourse of competence models, teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and self-regulated learning (SRL) can be seen as relevant content-specific (TPACK) and generic (SRL) dispositions. This study aims to demonstrate how both dispositions can be promoted in university teacher education using tailor-made digital learning tools consisting of multimedia self-study material, focusing on TPACK and SRL. We integrated the tools into regular university courses, where economics education students used these tools to train their TPACK (n = 91) and SRL (n = 35). The results of the pre-post analyses indicated that these tools could meaningfully complement university teacher education to promote the intended dispositions.