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Integrating information and communication technology (ICT) into STEM education enhances instructional quality and cultivates students’ interdisciplinary problem-solving. STEM teachers’ attitudes—driven by perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU)—are pivotal in ICT adoption, and pre-service training offers a vital opportunity to shape these attitudes. Yet, empirical studies investigating how specific training strategies influence ICT attitudes via PEOU and PU remain scarce. Using a mixed-methods approach combining questionnaires and interviews, the results indicate that pre-service training significantly improved STEM teachers’ attitudes toward ICT-enhanced teaching. Socially interactive strategies (role models and collaboration) enhanced attitudes via PEOU by boosting confidence and reducing technology-related anxiety, cognitive design strategies (reflection and instructional design) operated through PU by emphasizing ICT’s pedagogical value, and experiential feedback strategies (authentic experience and feedback) influenced attitudes through both PEOU and PU, fostering integrated technical and pedagogical development. These findings support an integrated SQD–TAM framework and provide practical guidance for designing pre-service STEM teacher programs to promote sustained ICT adoption in China, and meanwhile highlights the importance of strategically sequencing training to cultivate both technological competence and pedagogical insight among future STEM educators.

This paper presents the results of a study undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective, which examines teachers' approaches to information communication technology (ICT)-enhanced teaching in vocational tertiary education. Twenty-three teachers from three Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews about their ways of experiencing the use of ICT in various vocational courses. The findings revealed two strategies with five main orientations to ICT-enhanced teaching distributed along a continuum from teacher-focused approaches: comprising information-oriented, feedback-oriented and practice-oriented to student-focused approaches: consisting of activity-oriented and industry-oriented teaching. The identified strategies and orientations extend the frameworks of teachers' approaches to ICT-enhanced teaching revealed in the previous phenomenographic studies in tertiary education. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these findings for TAFE sector and tertiary education in general. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This article presents the results of a study, undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective, which examines technical and further education (TAFE) teachers' conceptions of ICT-enhanced teaching. A cohort of 23 teachers from three TAFE institutions in Australia, participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. These interviews were used to identify the qualitatively different ways TAFE teachers understand and conceptualise of ICT-enhanced teaching. The interviews were analysed using an iterative process of reading and re-reading, and the seven steps of analysis process were followed. Through this process, five conceptions of ICT-enhanced teaching were emerged: to meet external expectations, to gain access to information and resources, as a delivery tool, a media for active learning, and to prepare students for future their profession. Likewise, four dimensions of variation were explored to establish relationship among the categories of conceptions, namely: the role of the teachers, the role of the students, the impact of technology on student and teacher knowledge, and who benefit from the use of ICT in teaching. The findings have highlighted new aspects of teaching in tertiary education and enhanced the existing teacher-centred and learning-centred framework of teachers' conceptions. This study provides useful information for people who work in the development of vocational education, teaching of industrial practices, and academic development programs. The study demonstrates the importance of further exploratory research to investigate relationship between teachers' conceptions of, and approaches to, ICT-enhanced teaching and students' conceptions of, and approaches to, ICT-enhanced learning in TAFE education.

The educational scenario after the COVID-19 confinement presents new challenges for teachers. Technological advances require teachers to be prepared for instruction through technology, and with this, the need for e-learning courses arose to strengthen this knowledge. This article aims to describe an innovative e-learning course in Educational Computational Chemistry (ECC) for in-service chemistry teachers through an Instructional Design (ID) that allows the development of the constructs associated with the Technological Pedagogical Science Knowledge (TPASK) framework. From the literature overview, relevant findings were raised concerning ID and its potential technological support. The results indicate that an effective ID must present general elements, such as the organisation and generation of content, progress monitoring, and feedback instances. However, the stages of engagement, flexibility, and positioning are relevant elements. These design elements are linked to emerging technological tools, such as artificial intelligence for generating audiovisual material, interactive content development, and event logs. In addition, positive results are evident from the teachers who participated in the ECC e-learning course, who project the knowledge, computer skills, and learning acquired into their professional work as chemistry teachers. Based on the above, a course design for ECC is proposed with general guidelines that contribute to the continuous training of in-service chemistry teachers.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed higher education radically and challenged faculties to adapt their teaching to the new circumstances. The aim of this study is to highlight changes, in particular, the advantages and disadvantages associated with them, and to find out what conclusions were drawn for the future in the three experimental natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In a guided interview, the majority of the university teachers in the bachelor’s programs were interviewed, and their statements were subsequently categorized. While lectures and tutorials in distance learning were held asynchronously or synchronously online, laboratory courses used a variety of formats. The number of disadvantages cited, as well as the number of university faculty citing the same disadvantage, is greater than for advantages. The most commonly cited drawbacks fall into the areas of workload, communication, feedback, and active student participation. Physical presence and a return to the original learning objectives in the lab courses is wanted by the majority. The results point to commonalities between the science subjects and should encourage science departments to work together on similar problems in similar formats in the future. Furthermore, there is an urgent and ongoing need for the training of natural science teachers in competence-oriented digital teaching.

Abduction is a method of reasoning that people use under uncertainty in a context in order to come up with new ideas. The use of abduction in this exploratory study is twofold: (i) abduction is a cross-disciplinary analytic tool that can be used to explain certain key aspects of human-computer interaction in advanced Information Society Technology (IST) environments; (ii) abduction is probably the central inferential mechanism at work when learners learn or in general make sense of things in an IST or mobile context. Consequently, abduction illuminates the special epistemological circumstances of IST enhanced learning, in particular when the learning materials and the learning environment have been arranged in accordance with constructivist pedagogical guidelines. A study of abductive reasoning will help us better understand IST enhanced learning and IST user behaviour as well as give us some valuable hints to the design of human-computer interaction in general.

By showcasing international, European, and community-based projects, this volume explores how online technologies using collaborative and blended learning can be used to bolster social cohesion and increase students' understanding of what it means to be a global citizen. With the pace of technology rapidly increasing, Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship draws timely attention to the global lessons being learned from the impact of these technologies on peace building, community development, and acceptance of difference. In-depth case studies showcasing successful projects in Europe, Northern Ireland, and Israel explore blended learning and illustrate how schools and educators have embraced online technologies to foster national and international links both within and beyond communities. This has, in turn, equipped students with experiences that have informed their attitudes to cultural and political conflicts, as well as racial, ethnic, and social diversity. Building on the authors' previous work Online Learning and Community Cohesion (2013), this thought-provoking text will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of international and comparative education. Educators and school leaders concerned with how multiculturalism and technology play out in the classroom environment will also benefit from reading this text.

This book considers the cognitive nature of courses connected with ICT or using ICT as an integral part of the course, including some views on the associated learning and teaching styles. Which factors lead to learning outcomes and are these intended or fortuitous? Factors may include ones specific to particular subject areas and their relationship with ICT, motivation associated with ICT usage, the interest which teachers, pupils and students who enjoy using ICT bring to the learning context. Recent developments in the use of ICT, particularly in an educational context where us of ICT has become one of the learning strategies in the portfolio of options teachers possess, have meant that the pedagogic usage has become more important generally. The focus of this book is on the curricular use of ICT and so course evaluation and design are the main contents of each chapter. In this sense the curriculum becomes the cognitive site of learning. Most other books look at specific pedagogic uses rather than the debate between subject and skill learning. Also, a government research paper indicates that thinking skills may well become the new focus for the next phase of development.