Student teachers' thinking processes and ICT integration: Predictors of prospective teaching behaviors with educational technology

Teacher candidates should be prepared to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) into their future teaching practices. Despite the increased availability and support for ICT integration, relatively few teachers intend to integrate ICT into their teaching activities. The available research has thus far focused on isolated teacher related variables to explain the weak level of ICT integration. Also, most of this research was set up in Western settings. The present study centers on the impact of Chinese student teachers' gender, constructivist teaching beliefs, teaching self-efficacy, computer self-efficacy, and computer attitudes on their prospective ICT use. For this purpose, a survey was set up involving teacher education college students of four teacher education universities in China (N = 727). Results showed that prospective ICT integration significantly correlates with all teacher related variables. Building on a path analysis, prospective ICT integration could be directly predicted on the base of teacher thinking variables (constructivist teaching beliefs, teacher self-efficacy, computer self-efficacy and computer attitudes in education), and indirectly by the gender of the student teachers. Implications for teacher education and further research are discussed. Suggested Reviewers: