Investigating teacher's technological pedagogical content knowledge in a CAD-enabled learning environment

There has been an increased emphasis on the integration of engineering design with
science learning across all grades in the K-12 school curriculum. A critical aspect of this integration process is understanding teacher preparedness and their knowledge about the technology, content, and pedagogy relevant for the effective implementation of such integrated curriculum. Researchers have highlighted the perennial yet ill-defined need for preparing teachers to integrate technology in teaching and learning (Koehler, Mishra, & Yahya, 2007; Rodrigues, 2003). In fact, prior research suggests that teachers may not be prepared to integrate technologies and other scaffolds that are crucial for students’ productive engagement with engineering design (Koehler, Mishra, & Yahya, 2007). Teaching technology skills isolated from the classroom context in which they need to be implemented does not help (Kenny, 2002). Thus, the need of the hour is classroom environments that provide teachers opportunities for engaging deeply and meaningfully with the technology and scaffolding the implementation of technology to support science and engineering learning. This exploratory work presents findings from a study that investigates teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge in the context of a project-based unit using a CAD tool- Energy3D (Xie et al., 2014). It looks at ways in which teachers orchestrated their classroom instruction and interactions with the students. The research question guiding this study is- How do teachers orchestrate a project-based engineering design and science activity supported by a CAD tool?