Maintaining Curriculum Consistency of Technical and Vocational Educational Programs through Teacher Design Teams

Maintaining the quality and relevance of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) curricula is a great challenge for TVET institutions in developing countries. One major challenge lies in the lack of curriculum design expertise of TVET academics. The purpose of this multiplecase study is to explore the potential of professionally supported Teacher Design Teams (TDTs), a group of department teachers working collaboratively on a curriculum (re)design task, as an institution-based strategy for improving the relevance of TVET programs to the needs of the concerned stakeholders, namely industry. The study describes how four TDTs from different TVET college departments redesigned their programs systematically and relationally to improve their internal and external consistency. The findings indicated that although the teams found the re-design task a challenge, they felt positive about the TDT experience and its outcomes. The teams also perceived the consistency of their programs to have improved. The criticality of the support offered to the teams and the variety of the teams’ design work were salient themes captured during the design process. It is concluded that professionally supported TDTs can be an efficient strategy for maintaining the consistency of the TVET curriculu

Measuring primary school teachers’ attitudes towards new technology use: development and validation of the TANT questionnaire

This study concerns the development and validation of a questionnaire to measure primary school Teachers’ Attitudes towards New Technology use in teaching (TANT). Many researchers, policy makers and educators have emphasized the importance of using new technology in teaching. However, no instrument is available to measure teachers’ attitudes towards using new technology in teaching. In a previous literature study (authors), we used the well-known Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify and structure eight underlying factors that make up primary school teachers’ attitudes towards using technology in teaching. In the current study we aim to measure these factors. To that end, we developed eight corresponding scales, as well as a scale to measure primary school teachers’ use of new technology. Results of the validation study among 659 pre- and in-service teachers showed adequate convergent and discriminant validity for six attitudinal factors and teachers’ use of new technology. In addition, we explored the predictive validity of the attitudinal factors for explaining variability in teachers’ use of new technology and established configural, metric and scalar measurement invariance