TPACK in action: Contextual effects of pre-service and in-service teachers’ knowledge structures for technology integration

Context is regarded to crucially affect teachers’ application of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). However, whether and how contextual variables, such as instructional context or teaching experience, influence the concrete application of the different TPACK-components remains an open question. To explore teachers’ application of TPCK in various contexts, we re-analyzed data from two studies composing n = 198 pre-service and n = 243 in-service teachers. All teachers were asked to reason about the potential integration of educational technology across three instructional contexts (i.e., individualized learning, collaborative learning, and practice tasks). We analyzed the application of the different first-order TPACK-components (i.e., technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) using percentages and logistic regressions to determine the effects of instructional context and teaching experience. Additionally, we examined the co-occurrences of these components using Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). Overall, we found that technological knowledge played a dominant role across all instructional contexts regardless of teaching experience. However, the application of content knowledge varied considerably across instructional contexts. The analysis of the co-occurrences showed that technological and pedagogical knowledge was consistently applied together across all instructional contexts, while content knowledge co-occurred predominantly in practice tasks. Qualitative analyses further revealed that in-service teachers applied their TPCK in a more situated way in specific teaching scenarios, whereas pre-service teachers’ reasoning was more fragmented. These findings suggest that TPACK may be conceptualized as a dynamic construct that is applied differently depending on the context and teaching experience rather than a static integration of its components.