Summary of Journal 15

How Teacher Educators’Beliefs and Technology Uses Relate to Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs and Attitudes toward Technology

Hua Bai

The State University of New York at Potsdam

Peggy Ertmer

Purdue University

The puropose of this research was to examine preservice teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and attitudes toward technology in relation to teacher educators’ pedagogical beliefs and their technology uses. There are two research questions; a) what is the relationship between teacher educators’ belief and preservice teachers’ belief? and b) what is the relationship between teachers educators’ uses of technology and preservice teachers’ attitudes toward technology?

The participants consisted of 96 new teacher education students from 11 teaching majors and 14 instructors from 3 teacher education courses, referred to here as A, B, and C. There are six instructors were teaching course A, seven instructors were teaching course B and one instructor was teaching course C. The data collected from pre-survey which was conducted at the beginning of the semester and post-survey which was conducted at the end of the semester. The result indicated that only A instructors’ beliefs were significant in predicting students’ belief. Furthermore, most of students noted that taking course A positively influenced their teaching philosophies and helped them learn how to be teachers. And also, according to the comments made by the instructors in course A and B, the students were not exposed to much technology in their courses, so that they did not expect the students’ attitudes towrad technology to have been influenced.

This study suggested for further research to examine the difference of influence on preservice teachers’ technology attitudes between those teacher educators who expose students to more technology experiences and those who do not expose students to a lot of technology experiences.