Theoretical Foundations

The four TPACK course (re)design professional development modules developed in the MARCH^ET project are based on five theoretical foundations. Understanding these theoretical foundations helps us comprehend the modules’ course design and the considerations that go into choosing it. The first theoretical foundation is ‘social constructivism,’ which is an approach to good teaching and learning. The second theoretical foundation is the pedagogical design of the modules, which is based on an old but still very useful ‘pedagogical model’ developed by Van Gelder (1970), referred to in Dutch as the didactische analyse model (DA model). The third theoretical foundation is the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) for defining learning outcomes (often called ‘learning objectives’). The fourth theoretical foundation is Biggs ‘constructive alignment’ of learning outcomes, the learning process and assessments (Biggs, 2003), a widely accepted principle of pedagogically sound course design. The fifth and final foundation is the ‘action research’ approach. It is used as a reflection method by the participants in their own teaching practice.