Comparison of Natural Science Teacher’s TPACK Assessment Results based on Differences in Educational Background, Working Period, and Gender

Abstract

Teacher knowledge is an aspect of dynamic and contextual competence. In the field of education, one form of knowledge considered suitable to global developments in the current 21st-century is teacher's technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). For this reason, this study examines the natural science teacher assessment results, measured employing an essay instrument. The assessment was carried out based on group differences in three factors considered influencing the assessment results. A total of 250 natural science teachers in Banten Province were voluntarily given questions within the TPACK framework to be done online. Automatic scoring was applied in this assessment to get a consistent score from the answers given by the participants. The assessment score data were then analyzed by descriptive-quantitative research methods. The first results revealed in this study were based on educational background factors, where the highest mean score was obtained by a group of teachers with less suitable educational backgrounds. In the teacher group based on different working periods, the highest mean score was attained by the group of teachers with more than ten years of working period. In addition, the analysis results by gender indicated that the mean score of female teachers was slightly higher than that of male teachers. In this case, there was no significant difference in the scores between the groups based on the different tests performed on all the compared factors.