Supporting data for "Teachers’ private theories and adoption of educational affordance of FabLab in Elementary STEAM education in China"

In-service teachers incline to experience uncertainty in instructional design, pedagogical content knowledge and activities design in STEAM Maker education. These beliefs can be termed as teachers’ private theories, which influence their pedagogical decisions and classroom practices. To investigate these private theories, the introduction of educational affordances provides an analytical lens for understanding how teachers perceive the FabLab environment during the teaching and learning activities. In this research, educational affordances can be understood as various opportunities that support the teaching and learning activities through information perceived from technological tools and learning contexts (Xue & Churchill, 2019). However, existing research has rarely examined how teachers’ private theories are mediated by specific educational affordances in the FabLab teaching. Therefore, underpinned by the theory of teachers’ private theories and educational affordances, this research investigates how elementary STEAM teachers adopt FabLab affordances in their teaching designs, what private theories mediate this adoption and how these private theories transform through leveraging a RASE model. A descriptive multiple case study approach was employed, drawing on one-year longitudinal data including semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and document collections. Precisely, the collection of documents and the initial interview were used to identify the education affordances. Classroom observations examined how participating teachers’ private theories mediated their pedagogical decisions. In the meanwhile, the RASE (Resource, Activity, Support, Evaluation) model was introduced as a reflective framework to examine its influence on teachers’ private theories. In a nutshell, the outcomes of the research were: (a). the theory of educational affordances in the FabLab contexts; (b). teachers’ private theories influencing instructional decisions in the FabLab contexts; (c). the influence of adopting RASE model in teachers’ private theories. The findings revealed that teachers’ adoption of fabrication technologies were mediated by their private theories of learning, teaching design and institutional expectations. A framework of educational affordances in this study was proposed to explain how fabrication technologies were integrated into teaching practices. In addition, the use of RASE model was founded to support teachers in reflecting on and transforming their private theories related to the FabLab teaching. The theoretic and pragmatic implications of this research contribute to expanding the theory of educational affordances in Maker education, which provides insights for facilitating teaching and learning activities in the FabLab contexts. (371 words)