Exploring the relationship between Chinese pre-service teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their perceptions of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK)

This study aimed to investigate the differences between pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) perceived TPACK given the different clusters of their epistemic beliefs collected via a questionnaire. The responses gathered from 807 Chinese PSTs were utilised to elicit such a relationship. All of the participants responded to the Pre-service Teachers’ Epistemic Belief (PTEB) survey and the Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (TPACK) survey. The results of the cluster analysis revealed that the PSTs were characterised into three clusters according to their responses to the PTEB, labelled as the Positivist, Partial Constructivist and Constructivist clusters. The ANOVA revealed that the pre-service teachers in both the Positivist and Partial Constructivist clusters had stronger perceptions of their TPACK than did the Constructivist PSTs. The results imply that more nuanced approaches are needed to develop PSTs’ TPACK with reference to their epistemic profiles. In addition, it seems that the epistemic nature of creating TPACK may need to be discussed explicitly to foster PSTs’ epistemic developments.