The general technological competency model for vocational teachers in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Like in many Global South countries, the vocational education and training system in Kazakhstan has some weaknesses, including low-competent educators poorly applying digital technologies in their instructional repertoire, which highlights the need for motivating teachers towards incorporating technologies representing students' everyday life in the educational process. Meanwhile, there are no practically applicable competency frameworks for Kazakhstani vocational teachers to date. This paper aimed to gather students’ opinions on which skills are more or less important for vocational educators to outline a technological competency framework for Kazakhstani vocational teachers based on Digital Competency Profiler, with content validity tested by five experts. A set of nineteen items measured on a five-point Likert scale, organized into technical, communicational, informational, and epistemological domains, was uploaded to an online survey platform and distributed among Master degree students enrolled in vocational programs in Kazakhstan. Based on survey data, the construct validity of the model was assessed by confirmatory factor analysis, which yielded high entire reliability and internal consistency. The learners assigned importance to all the four domains. However, they estimated vocational teacher’s ability to utilize productivity tracking tools as almost futile, which allegedly indicates the surveyees’ insufficient awareness about those applications and their purposes. Generally, the participants tend to prioritize vocational educators’ capacities to process mathematical computations, visualize numerical data, and operate with electronic text files and projectors, as well as their readiness for effective communication through messengers and electronic mail. The framework that emerged from this research can be used as a blueprint for synchronizing and improving educational programs in Kazakhstan.

Keywords: education; survey; technology; ICT; vocational education and training.