Cleaning up the Mess: A Systematic Review on the Diverse Conceptualizations of the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) Framework

Abstract

Technology related professional knowledge is considered an essential prerequisite for teachers if they are to use educational technologies in classrooms effectively. In literature, the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) has become the central focus of researchers when it comes to knowledge regarding technology integration. Yet to date, the question of what TPACK constitutes remains a source of scholarly debate. The drive of this debate seems to mainly stem from the vast, diverse and often seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of TPACK that exist in the TPACK literature. To provide a comprehensive picture on TPACK, it is therefore necessary to understand and organize the different conceptualizations that researchers introduced when working on or with the TPACK model.

Against this background, we conduct a systematic review that attempts to clarify and systematize existing conceptualizations within the huge corpus of TPACK research. More precisely, we are interested in examining if TPACK researchers – in their endeavours of conceptualizing TPACK – have put emphasis on specific TPACK components (i.e., subdomains of TPACK: TK, CK, TPK, TCK, PCK, TPCK) while possibly neglecting others. In other words, we will examine which foci lenses have been used by researchers when dealing with the TPACK model. Moreover, we will accordingly analyse and categorize existing TPACK measurement methods used in data driven studies to gain a deeper understanding of the empirical applicability of existing TPACK conceptualizations.

Within this protocol, we preregister a systematic review that will help to organize and understand different existent TPACK conceptualizations in research, and thereby paves the way for fruitful applications of this highly complex framework in the future.