Teachers’ technology leadership: An assessment of postgraduate pre-service teachers’ perceptions based on NLP-augmented qualitative analysis
List of Authors
  • Bingbing Zhong , Dorothy DeWitt, Kenny S.L Cheah

Keyword
  • Teachers’ Technology Leadership, ISTE-E Standards, Technology integration, Natural language processing, Assessment research

Abstract
  • Qualitative analysis has been used to assess teachers’ technology leadership practice. However, it is not easy for qualitative researchers to reduce biases in the big data era, with issues such as big qualitative data and the complexity of data analysis. To achieve a more efficient and effective research, Natural language processing (NLP) can be a potential approach to address these methodological challenges. Since there was no study integrating qualitative analysis with NLP in this area, this study utilized an NLP-augmented qualitative analysis, which begins with qualitative data analysis then followed by NLP analysis in the design, for the assessment of teachers’ technology leadership practice. 133 postgraduate pre-service teachers in a Chinese normal university were selected to respond the open-ended question. Qualitative analysis was first conducted based on the ISTE-E standards, through categorizing codes into learners, leaders, citizens, collaborators, designers, facilitators, and analysts. NLP analysis, based on text preprocessing (including tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and removing stop-words), feature extraction with the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm, and sentence selection and assembly, was utilized to triangulate the qualitative results. The NLP-augmented qualitative analysis results revealed that teacher educators can practice technology leadership based on the ISTE-E standards to support students’ technology integration.

Reference
  • 1. Beytekin, O. F., & Unal, M. (2018). The views of foreign language school lecturers on technological leadership. Educational Policy and Research, 451-460.

    2. Bird, S., Klein, E., & Loper, E. (2009). Natural language processing with Python: analyzing text with the natural language toolkit. “O’Reilly Media, Inc.”. https:// www.nltk.org

    3. Chang, T., DeJonckheere, M., Vydiswaran, V. V., Li, J., Buis, L. R., & Guetterman, T. C. (2021). Accelerating mixed methods research with natural language processing of big text data. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 15(3), 398-412. https://doi.org/10.1177/15586898211021196

    4. Christian, H., Agus, M. P., & Suhartono, D. (2016). Single document automatic text summarization using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). ComTech: Computer, Mathematics and Engineering Applications, 7(4), 285-294. https://doi.org/10.21512/comtech.v7i4.3746

    5. Clements, T. J. (2018). Informal teacher leadership for technology integration: A multisite case study of distributed leadership [Doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky]. UKnowledge. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edsc_etds/35/

    6. Crompton, H. (2017). ISTE standards for educators: A guide for teachers and other professionals. International Society for Technology in Education.

    7. Dexter, S., & Richardson, J. W. (2020). What does technology integration research tell us about the leadership of technology?. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 52(1), 17-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2019.1668316

    8. Dexter, S., Richardson, J. W., & Nash, J. B. (2016). Leadership for technology use, integration, and innovation: A review of the empirical research and implications for leadership preparation. In Young, M.D., Crow, G.M. (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of school leaders, 216-242. New York, NY: Routledge.

    9. Diamond, S. E. A. (2019). Innovation and integration and technology in the classroom by career and technical educators (Order No. 30263003) [Doctoral dissertation, Auburn University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

    10. Graziano, K. J., Herring, M. C., Carpenter, J. P., Smaldino, S., & Finsness, E. S. (2017). A TPACK diagnostic tool for teacher education leaders. TechTrends, 61(4), 372-379. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-017-0171-7

    11. Herring, M., Thomas, T., & Redmond, P. (2014). Special editorial: Technology leadership for preparing tomorrow’s teachers to use technology. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 30(3), 76-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/21532974.2014.891875

    12. Howell, M. P. (2012). Teachers as technology leaders: A case study of a one-to-one laptop initiative [Doctoral dissertation, Auburn University]. http://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/3282

    13. International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). ISTE standards for teachers. https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-teachers

    14. International Society for Technology in Education. (2017). ISTE standards: educators. https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-teachers

    15. Kulkarni, A. R., & Apte, S. S. (2013). A domain-specific automatic text summarization using Fuzzy Logic. International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), 4(4), 449-461.

    16. Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. John Wiley & Sons.

    17. Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013). Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1301.3781

    18. Ministry of Education. (2021). Teachers’ professional competency standards for preservice teachers. http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A10/s6991/202104/t20210412_525943.html

    19. Munot, N., & Govilkar, S. S. (2014). Comparative study of text summarization methods. International Journal of Computer Applications, 102(12).

    20. Petrov, S., Das, D., & McDonald, R. (2011). A universal part-of-speech tagset. arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.2086.

    21. Samsudin, N., & Ghani, M. F. A. (2020). Teacher technological leadership: realising potentials and practices. In 3rd International Conference on Research of Educational Administration and Management (ICREAM 2019) (pp. 52-56). Atlantis Press. DOI: 10.2991/assehr.k.200130.138

    22. Seki, Y. (2002). Sentence Extraction by tf/idf and position weighting from Newspaper Articles. In NTCIR Workshop 3 Meeting TSC2 Working Notes of the Third NTCIR Workshop Meeting (pp. 55-59). National Institute of Informatics.

    23. Sun, J. Y. (2020). Jieba (9th ed.). https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba.git

    24. Thomas, T., Herring, M., Redmond, P., & Smaldino, S. (2013). Leading change and innovation in teacher preparation: A blueprint for developing TPACK ready teacher candidates. TechTrends, 57(5), 55-63. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-013-0692-7

    25. Twomey, C. R., Shamburg, C., & Zieger, L. B. (2006). Teachers as technology leaders: A guide to ISTE technology facilitation and technology leadership accreditation. Eugene OR: International Society for Technology in Education

    26. Voithofer, R., Nelson, M. J., Han, G., & Caines, A. (2019). Factors that influence TPACK adoption by teacher educators in the US. Educational Technology Research and Development, 67(6), 1427-1453.

    27. Wang, Y. J. (2019). Research on the construction of the framework of primary and secondary school teachers’ information and communication technology innovative competency: From the perspective of ISTE 2017 standards for educators. Journal of Distance Education, 37(06), 50-60. https://doi: 10.15881/j.cnki.cn33-1304/g4.2019.06.006.

    28. Yu, T. Z., & Zhang, X. F. (2020). Research on the effect of teacher information technology leadership on informatization teaching efficacy — An empirical analysis based on Structural Equation Model. Teacher Education Research, 32(02), 48-56. DOI: 10.13445/j.cnki.t.e.r.2020.02.008

    29. Zhong, B., DeWitt, D., Zheng, S., & Zhang, M. (2022). New Demands on College Teachers’ Teaching Competencies: Evidence from Teacher Education Revitalization Policies of China. Educational Leader (Pemimpin Pendidikan), 10(1), 92-103. https://ejournal.um.edu.my/index.php/PEMIMPIN/issue/download/2048/762