In Germany empirical studies addressing both teachers’ professional knowledge as well as their knowledge of successfully integrating ICT in their teaching are scarce, even though media literacy and media education of (pre-service) teachers are considerably well-theorized domains in the German education research (e.g. Tiede, Grafe, & Hobbs, 2015). Unfortunately, the aspect of knowing how to use ICT in instruction to support students’ learning has not yet been integrated into well-established models of teachers’ professional knowledge which are mostly based on Shulman’s (1986) concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).  

Originally developed for the US-school and teacher education system, Shulman’s approach of pedagogical content knowledge was adapted and extended to the context of teaching with ICT by incorporating technological knowledge as a unique knowledge domain. The new model was abbreviated as TPCK (technological pedagogical content knowledge, Mishra, & Koehler, 2006) but is nowadays mostly stylized as TPACK (Herring, Koehler, & Mishra, 2016). The TPACK-model rapidly gained international popularity and is deemed to be an influential concept for teacher training and professional development programs (ibid.).

The TPACK-model, usually depicted as a Venn-diagram with overlapping circles (Mishra, & Koehler, 2006), consists of seven knowledge domains – the three basic knowledge domains content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and technological knowledge (TK) as well as the four combinations of these domains. 

TPACK as the combined knowledge of all overlaps serves as the knowledge basis for good teaching with technology while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and can be considered an advanced understanding of teachers’ professional knowledge (Voogt et al., 2013).

In order to assess the TPACK of pre-service teachers Schmidt et al. (2009) developed a self-assessment survey instrument which served as basis for several studies investigating teachers’ TPACK (e.g. Alayyar, Fisser, & Voogt, 2012; Koh, Chai, & Tsai, 2014). However, as these studies had divergent samples, designs, purposes and degrees of modification from the original instrument, results are not unconditionally comparable. Nevertheless, consistent findings of ICT-related and TPACK-based studies indicate that male teachers rate their TPACK-knowledge higher regarding the knowledge domains involving technology (Koh et al., 2014) and younger teachers report higher self-assessed ICT-competencies (Fraillon et al., 2014) as well as TPACK-knowledge (Lee, & Tsai, 2010).

Despite the huge popularity of the TPACK framework which in recent years also significantly increased in Europe this approach is neither well-established in Germany nor has it been empirically applied in a German context. However, since media literacy has become essential in recent years, there is a clear necessity to analyze teachers’ TPACK in Germany in order to ensure adequate media education. Therefore, the goal of our presented study was to implement TPACK as part of a representative survey of secondary school teachers in Germany for the very first time in order to assess teachers’ self-proclaimed professional knowledge in terms of TPACK. For this purpose the TPACK survey instrument by Schmidt et al. (2009) was translated and adapted to be part of the representative teacher survey “Schule digital – der Länderindikator” conducted in Germany in 2016 (Bos et al., 2016). Keeping the aforementioned findings in mind, the aim of the study at hand is to analyze, whether teachers in Germany differ in terms of their self-assessed TPACK knowledge in such a way to be classified as different teacher types.

The research questions considered in this paper are

1)      How do teachers in Germany assess their TPACK according to selected knowledge domains?

2)      Can different types of teachers be identified based on their self-assessed TPACK?

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