Developing Prospective Teachers’ Beliefs about Digital Tools and Digital Feedback

Abstract

In classrooms today, teachers are asked to support their teaching with digital tools. For this purpose, teachers require not only technological knowledge but also corresponding beliefs about the advantages of digital tools. The development of those beliefs should already be embedded in the university education of teachers. To this end, we developed a university seminar aimed at fostering prospective teachers’ confidence in the utility of digital tools, using the digital tool STACK as an example. The seminar is based on learning mathematics with the digital tool STACK, independently designing digital tasks with said tool, and finally, reflecting on a teaching experiment with school students using STACK. To make the development of prospective teachers’ beliefs visible throughout the seminar, we worked with different qualitative methods. The results of this case study show that there are four developmental phases of prospective teachers’ beliefs which include an initial situation, a purely positive phase, a disillusionment, and a phase of differentiated beliefs. It becomes apparent that it is possible to develop prospective teachers’ beliefs about digital tools in a positive way.

Keywords

• beliefs
• development of beliefs
• prospective teachers
• teacher education
• computer uses in education
• electronic learning