Validation of the Survey of Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching and Technology: A Multi-Institutional Sample

Abstract

The TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) has gained tremendous momentum from within the educational technology community. Specifically, much discourse has focused on how to measure this multidimensional construct to further define the contours of the framework and potentially make some meaningful predictions. Some have proposed observation scales while other have proposed self-report measures to gauge the phenomenon. The Survey of Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching and Technology instrument is one popular tool designed to measure TPACK (Schmidt et al., 2009) specifically from preservice teachers in teacher education programs. This study extends the measurement framework by providing a confirmatory factor analysis of the theoretical model proposed by Schmidt et al. (2009) on a sample of 227 preservice teachers from four public institutions of higher education in the southeastern United States. The data did not fit the theoretical 10-factor model implied by Schmidt et al. (2009), thus, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the optimal structure of the measurement tool for these data. This resulted in a nine-factor model, and there were measurement issues for several of the constructs. Additionally, the article provides evidence of external validity by correlating the instrument scores with other known technology constructs.