Research on Information Technology and Teacher Education

Information Technology and Teacher Education (tTTE) has only become a specialized research discipline in the field of educational technology in recent years. It mainly studies how to train teachers in information technology so that they can better and more consciously use information technology effectively and reasonably in future teaching. This includes two levels: pre-service technology application training for teachers and technology education for teachers who train teachers. However, both focus on the effect of information technology on teaching and the successful practices and programs for technology education for teachers.

1. Development History of ITTE

Information technology and teacher education originated from "educational computerization". Educational computerization is to use computer technology in the education system or the training system of enterprises and institutions, which also includes how to use computer technology in teaching and training.

As early as the 1980s, more than 50 journals published academic papers related to ITTE. Many journals, such as the Journal of Research On Computing in Education, Computers in the schools, and Educational Technology, would publish articles on ITTE from time to time. In 1983, the first quarterly journal dedicated to ITTE academic research and practice, Journal of Teaching in Teacher Education, was published. It was published by an interest group under the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), which was composed of a group of teacher educators who were particularly interested in computer applications. In 1990, the first American RTTE conference was held under the organization later renamed the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) (http://www.race.org/conf/site/). SITE also publishes the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. Other journals related to "information technology and teacher education" include: Journal of Information Technology and Teacher Education, Technology and Teacher Education Annual. In addition, there are some professional journals in subject education that also publish papers on teacher education related to this field, such as Journal of Computing in Material Science Education and Journal of Computers in Early Childhood education. The core journal of teacher education, The Journal of Teacher Education and Conversion in Teacher Education, also published a special issue on technology and teacher education in 1996. All this indicates that ITFE is maturing as a sub-discipline.

2. Research Paradigm of ITTE

There are three common research paradigms for TITE research, which are based on empirical theory, critical theory and interpretive theory. Empirical research is mainly quantitative research, while reports of critical theory and interpretive theory tend to be qualitative research, although specific research may have both quantitative and qualitative data. These three theories have made outstanding contributions to ITTE research from different perspectives.

1. Empirical Theory

Empirical theory, also known as empiricism, positivism, post-positivism or logical positivism, believes that the scientific method is the only correct way to study human behavior. Many researchers believe that the external objective world can be known and quantified from an empirical perspective. The main contributions of empirical theory to lITE research are:

(1) Provide an accurate description of computer use in schools

For example, a series of works by Becker (1986, 1991, 1994, i999) showed the development of computer applications in schools;

(2) Understand the actual application of technology in teacher education

For example, a survey conducted by the International Society for Technology in Education (Moursund & Bielefeldt, 1999) on 416 teacher education institutions in the United States.

These investigations have stimulated people's interest in computer-related classroom practices. However, empirical researchers have also realized that the use of empirical investigations alone, even if the method is correct, will lead researchers to incomplete or one-sided conclusions, because the inductive method of generalizing from samples to the general based on empirical theories is prone to problems.

2. Critical theory

Critical theory is an extension of classical Marxist theory, which focuses on the consideration of production factors rather than the control of production tools: advocates of these theories believe that in modern society, everything is interconnected, and the gain of one group is at the expense of another group. For example, the class that controls newspapers and the news industry will impose its views on other classes: it can be said that critical theorists are generally idealists who do their best to find bias, inappropriate power relations, and other kinds of domination and oppression. They believe that educational technology scholars should be more concerned with some essential, important, forward-looking and spiritual research issues. Including social relations, feminism, popular culture, and the relationship between educational technology and language, vision, race, capital, military, politics, ethics and ecology. (Nich01s & Allen Brown, 1997) The main contributions of critical theory to ITFE research are:

(1) Discuss the harm of blindly applying computer education to education. For example, Apple (1991) discussed in detail whether teaching as a professional skill would become stronger due to technological progress. He pointed out that if the current trend continues (referring to computer-assisted teaching), teaching skills will disappear because teaching is redefined as a management job aimed at ensuring the normal operation of computers. It is the computer rather than the teacher who imparts specific skills and knowledge to students. C. Bowers (1998) further pointed out in his article entitled "Teaching 19th Century Thinking Patterns with 20th Century Machines" that computer technology was created by mainstream culture and represents the interests and values ​​of powerful organizations in the culture. For example, it is precisely because business needs workers with certain basic knowledge to learn the skills required for a certain type of work that computers are used to impart these skills rather than helping students develop self-determined skills (self-determined skills can enable workers to discover their own interests and conflict with the interests of employers).

(2) Reflecting on the many inequalities caused by the introduction of technology into the field of education

For example, gender issues in educational software (Chappell, 1996), the current situation of disadvantaged groups being neglected in the technical education environment (Chisholm, 1998), etc. These research results can be directly used in teacher education, so that teachers can consciously correct this in their future teaching.

Critical theory research is ideological and uses a variety of methods. For example, Monke (1997) used case study methods to study the application of technology in Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa in detail, revealing the importance of technology promotion to teachers and administrators and the huge costs involved. Chappell (1996) used content analysis to study the violent competition and gender representation problems in popular mathematics education software. Robinson, Wiegmann, and Nichols (1992) used sociocultural research methods to evaluate teaching materials. Francis (1996) combined instructional design technology to reform microteaching. The application of technology in teacher education will benefit from this type of critical thinking in many aspects. 3. Explanatory theory

Interpretation theory is related to psychological construction theory and is usually classified as qualitative analysis. The basic view of the research method of interpretation theory is that social science cannot find universal truths about human behavior, truth is always partial, temporary, and conditional, and the truth of social science research conclusions cannot be eternal or always correct; the main contributions of interpretation theory to ITTE research are:

(1) Emphasis on case studies and professional practice papers

Because interpretation theory holds that reality is constructed by different types of people. Therefore, what is true for some people may not be true for others. Case studies and professional practice papers are valuable sources of knowledge because they provide rich descriptions of relevant situations. Readers should not regard research papers as universal reflections of truth, but rather as the author's subjective description of events in a specific context. Therefore, readers can decide what information is useful to them based on their specific circumstances.

(2) Advocating for “participatory research”

Participatory research (Heron, 1996) includes participatory action research and other forms of research that eliminate the distinction between researchers and participants. In participatory research, there are only participants, not subjects. Participants can play an active role in everything, from the design and development of the research to the analysis and reporting of data. Interpretative theory has helped to justify the name of instructional design research in research universities, where research on instructional design was not considered research before.

(3) Broadening the forms of research results publication Although traditional research papers, those with detailed experimental design, process description and understanding of research problems, are still the most common form of results reporting. However, many other reporting forms are now becoming widely accepted, such as narrative cases, videos, short stories or scripts, and works of art (such as sculptures or paintings). The same case study method may be used to explain the theory in the form of "non-fiction educational stories".

The study of ITTE using the above three paradigms has drawn many valuable conclusions from different angles and aspects; when conducting research in the ITTE field, we should comprehensively apply various research paradigms based on the work we are engaged in and the goals we want to achieve.

3. ITTE Research Scope

Based on some ITTE review reports and related papers, we have classified the ITTE research to date into the following seven categories:

1. Current situation investigation and research

As mentioned above, Becker's series of work mainly studies the use of computers in the classroom. Since 1986, he has published a report almost every five years, showing the development of computer applications in schools. Becker found that integrating computers into classroom teaching was a painful and slow process.

Among the many reports on the current status of ITTE in the United States, the most famous is a series of surveys specifically on technology and teacher education commissioned by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1995. The research found that most schools do not do enough to train pre-service teachers to use technology.

2. Research on relevant policies

Policy research mainly studies what policies should be formulated by various educational management agencies and proposes solutions to some problems that have been discovered from a global perspective. Robinson's (1995) paper on the relationship between ITI'E and the British national curriculum system is a good example. It discusses policy issues at the national level: research on policy aspects can also make some developmental suggestions based on teacher feedback; Fisher (1997) interviewed 287 K-12 teachers who use technology in Colorado and asked them what they think should be included in pre-service education programs. Another project that conducts policy and process research through expert surveys was hosted by Herring (1997). The content is about what support school districts should provide if constructivist teaching is encouraged in distance education. Herring selected 12 nationally renowned experts who are famous for using technology using constructivist methods. The results of Herrings' research and the methods and strategies he adopted laid the foundation for us to create distance education based on constructivism.

3. Research on the attitude of teachers and students

Brownell (1997) selected 28 studies in a review of IQ'rE research from 1990 to 1995 and found that many studies involved attitudinal research, including surveys to understand teachers' and students' attitudes toward the use of technology in schools, and whether attitudes change after technology training (see Willis and Mehlinger, 1996 for a review of this type of literature). Most surveys and studies show that teachers have a positive attitude toward the use of technology in schools, but they are not confident about using technology in the classroom, and they also believe that teacher education has not taught them to use technology innovatively. Laffev and Musser's study also found that some normal school students believe that technology in the classroom will interfere with the connection between teachers and students; 4. Teaching application research

There is a criticism of attitude research that we do not need to understand whether teachers have a positive attitude towards technology. What we need more is typical cases of how to promote teachers to use technology in teaching. The OTA (1995) report also proposed that in the future, attention should be paid to discovering, researching and promoting good cases of effective technology integration in teacher education. In this regard, professional practice papers based on interpretivism provide us with a lot of information. For example, Woo & ow's (1998) paper describes the common problems in preparing teachers to use technology in the classroom. His professional practice paper was written based on four years of experience in cooperation with K-12 schools and universities:

5. Training program research

Since many studies have found that pre-service teacher training has serious deficiencies in technology education and technology preparation, many documents have also introduced excellent solutions for applying technology to teacher education courses. For example, Stuhlman (1998) introduced the work done by Louisiana State University in this regard: case + internship, and Thompson, Schmidt and Hadjiyianni (1995) described a one-on-one training method in which a graduate student mentored a teacher at Iowa State University. There are also some papers that detail how to use instructional design technology to design teacher training courses (Brush? 1998).

6. Summary and reflection

There are also some papers on ITTE that describe and summarize various reform measures in previous research work, such as Boehmer and Waugh (1997)'s study on distance apprenticeship teaching projects, and Goldman and colleagues (Coldman and Barron. 1990; Goldman, Ban'on and Witherspoon. 1991)'s case study on how to apply hypermedia technology in teacher education. More summaries and reflections come from teachers who participated in the implementation of the reform. A group of teachers at the University of Alberta (Gibson and Hart. 1997) published some research related to their experiences. The teachers said that the preparations before the implementation of the reform were insufficient, and they did not understand the potential of technology until they entered the implementation stage. Similar reports on the experience of trying to use technology in the classroom are very useful.

7. Research on Computer-Assisted Teacher Education

The development and experimentation of products related to the use of computer technology to support teacher training is also a hot topic in the ITTE field, including the creation of multimedia or WWW-based teaching software packages, the establishment of a computer environment for implementing teacher training (Jin, 1997: Robin and Miller, 1998), and the study of the role of computer simulation/Strang (1995), interactive video CDs (Cennamo, Abell, George and Chung, 1996), distance learning (Boone, 1995), electronic conference systems (Harrington and Quinn-Leering, 1996), e-mail (Johnson, 1997) and teaching websites in promoting teacher technology education, as well as the impact on teaching effectiveness. These research results reflect the role of specific computer technology in teacher training and provide a basis for the full and effective use of various information technologies in teacher training and in teacher teaching.

From the perspective of future development, promoting ITYE experience exchange and resource sharing and creating a high-quality teacher technology education environment will be the main tasks in this field in the future.

4. Some Explanations

This article briefly introduces the research methods and contents of information technology and teacher education, a branch of educational technology. The basic data comes from the article published by Willis, Jerry Thompson and Ann Sadera in the 4th issue of Educational Technology Research & Development in 1999: Research on technology and teacher education: current status and future directions. The Chinese translation of this article will appear in the "Research, Methods and Strategies" volume of the "Contemporary Educational Technology Series" published by Beijing Normal University Press in October 2002 (edited by Miao Rong and Zhao Guodong). The original article provides more detailed data sources and analysis. Based on that article, this article re-summarizes and organizes it according to our understanding of this field, and adds the classification of research content.

Although the information in this article mainly focuses on research in this field in the United States, because it is an article introducing the research field, we believe that these data can reflect the development and research status of this field.

At present, many domestic colleges and universities have established teacher information technology training centers, and primary and secondary schools also have teacher information technology training programs: We hope that through this article, more people in the country will be encouraged to carry out relevant research activities when conducting teacher information technology training practices, comprehensively utilize the three research paradigms introduced, and correctly, scientifically and accurately summarize and report research results, thereby promoting communication and development in the field of rTTE in China.

References

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