Improving the depth and breadth of teacher and student learning are major national goals. Technology holds great promise as a catalyst for achieving these goals. Unfortunately, our knowledge of how best to harness technology to improve teacher and student learning is extremely limited. Furthermore, the inherently dynamic and complex context that juxtaposes teacher education, educational technology, and the practice of teaching demands a multi-faceted approach to building a knowledge base sufficient to address issues of what works, for whom, and why.

This project studies several important aspects of ongoing efforts to prepare teachers to use technology effectively with their students, focusing on the impact of college and university preservice teacher education programs. Our project will:

Link the knowledge and skills of beginning teachers to variations in the learning experiences and organizational contexts of their teacher preparation programs. Understanding these connections is especially important and timely because institutions of higher education are attempting to respond to the challenges of incorporating technology into teacher education program experiences, driven in part by evolving standards for K-12 teacher candidate certification which include knowledge of the integration of technology into instruction.

Conduct our analyses of teacher candidate learning, program experiences, and organizational contexts using a theoretical framework that describes characteristics of powerful learning environments, including the roles that technology can play in supporting the teaching and learning process. This framework about technology and “How People Learn” guides the process of describing important variations in teacher preparation program contexts and outcomes in terms of the knowledge, skills and performances exhibited by beginning teachers as they develop teaching expertise.

Create a knowledge base that can be used to assist teacher education institutions, including those studied in this project as well as the teacher education field more generally, to develop principled implementation strategies for changing teacher education programs to incorporate effective practices that are connected to a knowledge base of research and theory. Thus, we see the current effort as setting the stage for subsequent research and development work that evaluates how effectively strategies for teacher preparation in areas of technology and instruction can “travel” and function in the varying contexts for preparing teachers that exist in America.