A Glimpse Into Primary and Secondary Teachers’ Knowledge to Teach Informatics
摘要
In this article, we present a regional overview of teachers’ knowledge to teach informatics. It was obtained through a self-reported quantitative evaluation instrument of informatics teachers’ knowledge addressing the seven domains of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model. Sixty-four teachers of French-speaking Switzerland participated from various educational levels, including primary, secondary, and higher education. While primary teachers had mostly informatics education during their teacher education, upper-secondary teachers all had informatics as a major or secondary topic in the university. Using dimensionality reduction techniques (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis), we extract the latent features from the knowledge expressed according to the seven domains of TPACK. Subsequently, executing an agglomerative hierarchical clustering, we group the teachers in clusters and explore the relations between those clusters and their professional profile. As a result, we can say that upper-secondary teachers express higher knowledge both on the didactical and foundational aspects of informatics teaching. Primary and lower-secondary teachers express low self-efficacy in domains related to the contents of informatics and higher self-efficacy in domains related to technology. This process facilitated the identification of adjustments that could be integrated into teacher education programs to address these needs.