Dede, E. (2017). Turkish pre-service secondary mathematics teachers: An examination of TPACK, affect, and their relationship (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global database. (UMI No. 10607510) 

Abstract:

“Pre-service teachers’ knowledge, beliefs or attitudes gained during their undergraduate education is one of the most influential factors shaping their future teaching in their field. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK; Mishra & Koehler, 2006) identifies the knowledge domains needed by teachers to effectively integrate technology into teaching their field. Due to the fact that pre-service teachers’ TPACK domains cannot be directly measured, most of research studies in the literature addressed developing a TPACK survey instrument in order to indirectly measure teachers’ TPACK in terms of their perceptions. However, there were rare research studies focusing on development a TPACK survey instrument for pre-service secondary mathematics teachers, especially in Turkey too. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to examine Turkish pre-service secondary mathematics teachers’ perceptions regarding TPACK domains, as well as adapting TPACK survey instrument, developed by Zelkowski and his colleagues (2013), into Turkish language and context. Another purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among TPACK components, and the relationships of pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards use of technology in education with their TPACK components. This study also aims to explore the effects of demographics differences (gender and year of enrollment) on their perceptions regarding TPACK domains and attitudes. 

Survey, correlational and causal-comparative research designs were used in this study. To adapt the TPACK survey instrument into Turkish, the following processes were used: forward translation, backwards translation, comparison of original TPACK survey with backward translation, expert reviews and cognitive interviews. The data were collected in terms of two studies, the pilot and main studies, during the fall semester of 2016 in Turkey. Two survey instruments, the Turkish TPACK and Attitude scale towards Computer-Aided Education (Arslan, 2006), were used to collect the data. The total of 778 pre-service secondary mathematics teachers participated in this study as volunteer. The pilot study data was used to examine translation of the Turkish TPACK survey instrument and to determine its hypothesized factor structure. The main study data was utilized to validate its factor structure and to conduct further statistical analysis related to the research questions. 

The results of factor and reliability analysis showed that the Turkish TPACK survey instrument is valid and reliable for five factors (TK, CK, PK, TPK, and TPACK) including 29 items. The findings of correlations analysis indicated that there were significant positive correlations among five TPACK components with small or moderate effect sizes. In addition, the relationships of pre-service teachers’ attitudes with TPACK components were positive and significant, with small or moderate effect sizes. The results of MANOVA displayed that the linear combination of TPACK components differentiated with respect to pre-service teachers’ gender and year of enrollment. According to findings of MANOVA, male pre-service teachers had significantly better perceptions about TK and CK than females. Furthermore, fifth grades showed significantly higher perceptions related to CK and TPACK than first and second grades, as well as third grades had greater perceptions on CK than first grades. The findings of ANOVA revealed that there were no statistically differences of pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards use of technology with respect to gender, although they had significantly mean differences in regard to year of enrollment. According to the results of ANOVA, five grades had more positive attitudes than first and second grades, as well as third grades had more positive attitudes than first grades. Regarding of finding in this study, future research may focus on which factors influence the development of pre-service teachers’ TPACK by means of experimental research studies; and on why male and female pre-service teachers’ perceptions in associated with some of TPACK components become different.”