Abstract:
The role of technology in the field of education continues to grow and the widespread adoption of online education in recent years has secured the importance attached to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In line with this, the current study aims to unveil pre-service teachers’ perceptions of how well their teacher training programs prepare them for effective ICT utilization and the level of support they receive from their teacher training programs as to effective ICT use by employing the synthesis of qualitative evidence (SQD) scale. With this aim in mind, the study adopts a convergent-parallel mixed methods design and the data have been garnered from a total of 191 pre-service English language teachers studying at 9 different teacher training programs across Türkiye. The analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data indicate that a majority of pre-service teachers think that the level of support they receive from their teacher training programs in terms of effective ICT use is not satisfactory. The perceptions of the participants that consider their teacher training programs (in)effective in terms of ICT use have also been presented within the study. Finally, several suggestions have been provided for teacher training programs with the aim of training pre-service with better and higher ICT utilization skills.
