Pre-service teachersʼ attitudes towards technology, engagement in active learning, and creativity as predictors of ability to innovate

Teacher’s subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, skills, attitudes and self-efficacy guide teacher’s behaviour in the classroom. Little is understood how pre-service teachers’ beliefs, affective and conative abilities along with creative potential support their technological and engineering behaviour necessary for inventiveness. The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards technology, perceptions and experiences with their own engagement in technology and engineering activities, and their creative potential that have been shown to support their innovative behaviour. A total of 124 pre-service teachers participated in this study. The Twenty-five-Item Technology and Me survey, the Test of Creative Thinking-Divergent Production, and the Twenty-three-Item Action and Me survey were used to measure the teachers’ attitudes towards technology, creative potential, and their situational interest, perceived course learning value, satisfaction, and technological and engineering behaviour. A conceptual model was hypothesized, tested, and supported by the results using confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modelling. Findings indicate that pre-service teachers who had higher scores on interest for technology had higher situational interest, higher creative performance, and higher ability to innovate. Students who had higher scores on perceived consequences of technology had less creative performance while students who had higher scores on perceived technology difficulty had lower scores on perceived learning value of the course and lower scores on course design quality. Pre-service teachers own creativity, perceived course design, situational interest, and perceived learning value mediate the relationship between attitudes towards technology and perceived ability to innovate. Our results offer important implications about how to prepare pre-service technology and engineering teachers for innovative performance towards enhancing technological knowledge and skills