Preservice teachers' risk perceptions and willingness to use educational technologies: A belief system approach

Abstract

One of the beliefs that is responsible for teachers' resistance to educational technologies (Ets) is risk perceptions. Risk psychology scholars describe risk perception as people's informal estimation of the probability of an event happening combined with an evaluation of how concerned they would be about the negative consequences of such an incident. About the nature of risk perceptions, three theoretical explanations have been put forwarded: cultural theory, affect heuristic and psychometric paradigm. Because cultural theory has limited predictive power in the empirical research and because affect heuristic not only covers risks but also contains benefits, we focus mainly on psychometric paradigm in the present study. The psychometric paradigm emphasizes that risk is a combination of many factors such as knowledge, dread, control, catastrophic potential, equity, voluntariness and tamper with the nature. The purpose of present study was to understand the predictive power of risk perceptions for pre-service teachers (PTs)' willingness to use Ets. We developed a questionnaire covering three sections: personal information, willingness to use Ets and risk perceptions. We administered this questionnaire to 425 Turkish PTs from different backgrounds (STEM and non-STEM branches). We benefited from factor analysis and hierarchical regression for data analyses. The results of factor analyze showed that six dimensions (dread, unnatural consequences, negative impacts on learning, noneducational purposes, traditional education and first-time use) constituted the PTs' risk perceptions. The regression results showed that certain risk perception dimensions were predictors of willingness to use Ets. At the end of the paper, we suggested implications based on enhancement strategies for teacher epistemology and risk mitigation opportunities.