Pre-service teachers' competences for teaching science through information and communication technologies during teaching practice

[摘要] English: Most observers, curriculum designers and policy makers agree that ICTs are an important competency for university students to have in order to compete and perform successfully in their careers in the 21st century. Teacher education students or pre-service teachers are no exception. While some universities, including the one I studied at, encourage ICT usage in their policies and seek to integrate ICTs in all teacher education modules, there is neither a guideline on how pre-service teachers should integrate the ICT tools in their own subject teaching nor a set of performance standards or expectations for teacher educators in South Africa to assess and support the integration of ICTs by students, especially during teaching practice. This study arises out of the concerns that the majority of teachers in schools, some of whom are recent university graduates, struggle to integrate ICTs in their teaching of specific subjects and/or topics. In trying to explore the role of universities generally and the teacher education programmes specifically in the development of ICT capacities and identities of newly qualified teachers, the present study investigated the opportunities to learn and the perceived competences of pre-service teachers in the use ICTs for teaching science in schools. Using a sample of 103 final year science pre-service teachers at one university in South Africa, this concurrent mixed methods study used an adapted version of the TPACK survey for pre-service teachers, developed by Schmidt and colleagues in the USA (Schmidt, Baran, Thompson, Mishra, Koehler, & Shin 2009), with lesson plan analysis and focus group interviews to map out the perceived competences of pre-service teachers on ICT knowledge and skills, their opportunities to learn these skills in the teacher education programme and their use of ICT tools for teaching science during school placement in the final semester before graduation to become newly qualified teachers.Overall, the key findings in the study suggest that there are significant variations in the ICT competences of the final-year science pre-service teachers from even a single university and/or a common teacher education programme. These variations largely result from the uneven opportunities to learn that are provided to the pre-service teachers, especially during their school placement period. While the differences in ICT module requirements for the various groups of pre-service teachers account for some of the variation in competence, the bulk of the explanation seem to come from the differences that accrue from the in-school experience during teaching practice, where some students are assigned to schools with no facilities or opportunities at all to use ICTs for teaching and/or are assigned to mentors who are themselves not adept users of ICTs, let alone being able to mentor them in the use ICTs for teaching. The study also found that most pre-service teachers were, however, aware of the range of ICT tools that are available for use in teaching science as a result of their ICT lecturers' use of these tools and particularly their use by the subject methodology lecturers. During teaching practice, though, many of the pre-service teachers who ventured into using ICTs tended to opt for low-technology tools such as over-head projectors and printers as opposed to the use of multi-media tools such as cell phones and other digital devices. The study found no instances of ICT use for teaching science in ways that engage learners in scientific investigations and/or with activities from their real-life experiences. Interestingly, where mobile technology devices were used, they were commonly for knowledge enhancement by pre-service teachers, not for actual teaching of science.These findings call for a more carefully considered and structured teacher education programme, based on the principles of quality, equity and access. Programmes should be structured such that ICT modules are accessed by all students in the programme, coupled with a deliberate choice of teaching practice schools that offer opportunities for student teachers to practice with cutting edge ICTs for teaching science and to receive mentoring from school-based mentors who are themselves competent and able to offer support to novices in the use of such tools. Thus, the central thesis of this study is that the richer the quality of opportunities to learn, as defined by both the university-based coursework and the in- school-based opportunities for practice in the use of ICTs, the better the chances for developing competence among all pre-service teachers to use ICTs for subject teaching.

[发布机构] University of the Free State