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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Teacher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1455074
This article is part of the Research Topic Digital Collaborative Learning in General, Higher, and Business Education View all 10 articles

(How) Can we foster pre-service teachers' competences for digital collaboration?

Provisionally accepted
Annika Ohle-Peters Annika Ohle-Peters 1,2*Ulrich Ludewig Ulrich Ludewig 1,2Nele McElvany Nele McElvany 1,2
  • 1 Center for Research on Education and School Development, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany
  • 2 Technical University Dortmund, Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Digital collaboration in schools is becoming increasingly important in educational processes -for teachers as well as for students. Teachers' competences, including professional knowledge (e.g., technological-pedagogical content knowledge; TPCK), attitudes (e.g., regarding the usefulness of digital collaboration) and their motivational orientations (e.g., intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy beliefs), are essential prerequisites for digital collaboration within the teaching staff and for teaching students how to learn collaboratively using digital media. Teacher education at universities plays a crucial role in the development of teachers' professional competences, yet little is known about how teachers' digital collaboration competences can be fostered effectively. Hence, the research aim was to investigate a) the development of pre-service teachers' TPCK, attitudes, and motivational orientations towards digital collaboration in general, b) analyze the development of their intentions to use digital collaboration in the future, and c) evaluate the effectiveness of interventions focused on digitally collaborative learning. In this multi-cohort intervention quasi-experimental study with prepost design, N = 439 students participated either in intervention group (IG) courses (nIG = 351) explicitly fostering digital collaboration or in regular university courses without explicit fostering of digital collaboration, who served as a control group (CG; nCG = 88). Results of conditional latent three-level growth models indicate a positive development of pre-service teachers' TPCK and their intentions to use digital collaboration. This research contributes to the highly relevant question of how to prepare teachers for increasingly digitalized teaching and learning settings in school.

    Keywords: Teacher competences, digitalization, Digital collaboration, professional knowledge, Teacher attitudes, teacher motivation, TPACK

    Received: 27 Jun 2024; Accepted: 21 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Ohle-Peters, Ludewig and McElvany. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Annika Ohle-Peters, Center for Research on Education and School Development, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.