Extended Social Cognitive Model Explains Pre-Service Teachers’ Technology Integration Intentions with Cross-Cultural Validity

Despite decades of efforts to address all levels of barriers, promoting technology integration in schools continues to be challenging and one of the most active research areas in teacher education worldwide. There is a need to better understand the factors influencing teachers’ intentions to integrate technology. Current models may lack parsimony and are limited in practical implications. Therefore, the primary purpose of the current study was to develop a new model by extending social cognitive theory. to explain pre-service teachers’ technology integration intentions and to test its cross-cultural validity with Turkish and Spanish pre-service teachers. The participants were 135 (76 Turkish and 59 Spanish) pre-service teachers in the early childhood education department. Path analysis results supported the utility of the model and revealed that openness, facilitating conditions, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations are interrelated, and each plays a unique and complex role in explaining technology integration intentions. More importantly, multi-group invariance analysis test results revealed that the proposed model explained pre-service teachers’ technology integration intentions in Turkish and Spanish samples with the exception of only one path, from openness to outcome expectations. The current extended social cognitive theory model is concise, includes pertinent constructs from other theoretical frameworks and models, and offers practical implications for teacher educators.