Cleaning up the Mess: A Systematic Review on the Various Understandings of the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) Framework in Interventions

Abstract

To integrate educational technologies effectively in their classrooms, teachers need technology-related knowledge. The technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) has become the central focus of researchers when it comes to such knowledge. 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 and diverse conceptualizations of TPACK for specific subjects 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 framed within TPACK. More precisely, we are interested in examining if TPACK researchers – in their endeavours of fostering TPACK – have put emphasis on specific TPACK components (i.e., TK, CK, PK, TCK, PCK, TPCK). To do so, we will systematically include and categorize interventions that contain rich descriptions of the learning environments as this allows us best to see which subcomponents of TPACK researchers have mainly focused on.