Developing digital human capital: Formation mechanism and human resource development framework of pre-service teachers’ AI integration competence
Abstract
As the artificial intelligence (AI) technology is fully integrated into the education field, AI integration involves developing AI integration among the pre-service educators as the human resource of tomorrow. Education has been a determinant of the quality of education and the digital transformation of education. The study will focus on the research objectives, as follows, to investigate the contemporary status of pre-service teacher using AI-TPACK competencies, to study the differences by gender, grade, school level and years of teaching experience, to test the impact that school technical support, technological attitude and technological competence impose on AI-TPACK formation, and finally to generate an AI-TPACK theory of pre-service teacher human resources. The research gathered the data by conducting a questionnaire survey of 325 pre-service teachers in Chinese universities, but it mainly utilized structural equation modeling to analyze the data. The results showed that pre-service teachers display fairly high overall levels of AI-TPACK, but they do not show competencies in their technical knowledge (AI-TK) and technological integration (e.g., AI-TPK, AI-TCK). Technological support, attitudes, and technological competence in schools are important determinants of their AI-TPACK products and institutional level and teaching experience are critical external moderators. Based on these findings, this paper makes a systematic suggestion on how the AI integration capabilities of pre-service teachers can be developed based on the human resource development perspective. This framework includes four folds, namely optimization of curriculum, enhancement of practice, resource support and policy guidance.
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