Results of the Technological Profile Inventory Questionnaire among Swedish Preschool Staff

The competence and knowledge of the preschool teacher is the most important factor for how the teaching is organised, and what the children are given opportunities to learn. For teaching technology, technological literacy (TL) constitutes such a competence. The TPI was created from a phenomenographic study on upper secondary students in South Africa and has thereafter been tested and validated for several groups of students in South Africa. We used the TPI to test the TL of 184 preschool teachers and childcare attendants. To test the validity and reliability of the instrument in this context, we performed an exploratory factor analysis followed by a test of internal consistency using Cronbach alpha. This resulted in five factors/categories, two for conceptions of technology and three for interaction with technology: Technology is conceived of as an artefact or a process, and interaction with technology is through direction, instruction or tinkering. This differs somewhat from the categories presented by Luckay and Collier-Reed. We discuss possible reasons for this. The technological profile of the preschool staff was then explored for the group by calculating the mean score for each category. Regarding the conceptions of technology, the scores for artefact and process are similar, implying that the preschool staff view technology as both artefacts and a process. For the interaction with technology, the category instruction got the highest score, followed by tinkering, while the score for direction was considerably lower. This shows an unafraid and curious approach to technological objects, which can be considered valuable in the teaching of technology.