Interplay of Cognitive, Affective and Ecological Factors Influencing Teachers’ Technology Integration Beliefs: A Contextualized Model

Abstract

Teachers’ beliefs change have been studied by many researchers and there are multiple models of belief change. Even though most of them agreed that cognitive, affective and contextual factors play a crucial role in forming beliefs, less attention is given to the contextual factors and the complex nature of interactions that happens within the ecology of teachers. Similarly, none of them developed by taking into account the Indian context. So, to fully capture the complex cognitive- affective-ecological factors that influence teacher beliefs about technology integration, we are trying to come up with a new model by identifying important factors relevant to the Indian context and augmenting them with the existing models. In order to identify India-specific factors, we designed a qualitative multi-case study. The study is ongoing, so far we have completed data collection with 14 secondary and high school science teachers from the Thrissur district of Kerala, India. Data is analysed using a thematic analysis method to extract themes.