Developing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) for Teachers of Chinese: A Mixed Methods Study

This mixed methods study explored the development of technological, pedagogical, content knowledge (TPACK) of Chinese teachers who attended the STARTALK Chinese Teacher Institute, a 10-day residential summer professional development program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A sequential explanatory design was adopted in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The initial quantitative phase consists of survey data from both pre and post measures. The quantitative data helped identify the impact of the professional development program on the participants’ TPACK development and purposefully select the informants for the second phase. Then a qualitative approach with open-ended questions on the survey, journals, lesson plans, and interviews of the participants was conducted in the second phase to further explain and explore the findings from the first phase. Thus, the quantitative data and results provided a general picture of the effect of the program, while the qualitative data and its analysis refined and explained those statistical results by exploring the participants’ TPACK development in more depth. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK) (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) was adopted as the theoretical lens for this research, and its principal components guided the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The majority of the scales in the quantitative instruments reported significant growth in participants’ TPACK knowledge. The qualitative data reported positive learning experiences throughout the program in all TPACK-related areas, such as context, pedagogical beliefs, technological beliefs, content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, technological knowledge, technological content knowledge, technological pedagogical knowledge, technological pedagogical content knowledge, teaching practices, and assessment. The findings from both the quantitative and the qualitative strands provided a deeper and more detailed picture of the phenomenon that would not have been achieved with either approach alone. In addition, the merged data analysis comparison unveiled congruencies and discrepancies between the quantitative and the qualitative data that enabled a more complete and deeper understanding of the research questions