A review of reviews on TPACK research: is there any focus?

Abstract

The TPACK framework describes what knowledge educators need to effectively integrate technology into teaching specific content. This integrated knowledge is specific to the domains that TPACK combines, i.e. to the content that is taught, the pedagogical approaches chosen and the technology used. Given that there is a substantial body of research literature on TPACK, it seems useful to focus review-studies on one domain. For example, a review might summarize what is known about teachers’ TPACK using a specific technology, comparing and combining the literature across content domains or pedagogical approaches. Inversely a review could also focus on specific content or on a specific pedagogical approach. In this review of reviews we investigate to what extent review research on TPACK focuses on specific domains (technology, pedagogy or content) or their related knowledge components in the TPACK-framework. Based on a systematic literature review of 32 review studies we find that few reviews focus their research questions, selection criteria or results on specific domains or knowledge components. This could be due to a lack of clarity regarding the interpretation of the model (analytic or holistic), about which only six reviews were explicit. We call on the field to clarify the interpretation of TPACK and to decide on which research would be needed to test the model. We argue that focused review studies could be one way to significantly advance the TPACK research field.