Contemporary education policies globally emphasise the importance of developing primary-level pre-service teacher (PST) digital competence. While authentic school placement is widely seen as the ideal space to develop these skills, the reported lived experiences of PSTs reveal an uneven reality. Grounded in Starkey's digital competence framework and utilising a Critical Realist Approach to Thematic Analysis, this study investigates the qualitative, self-reported placement experiences of final-year primary PSTs in Ireland. The findings indicate that while successful perceived experiences using digital technology in classrooms are associated with digital competence growth, school placement environments were reported to often fail to provide the stable conditions necessary for pedagogical experimentation. Specifically, participants narrated that digital competence development is frequently hindered by inconsistent school resources, unaligned expectations within the school placement triad (PST, cooperating teacher and placement tutor) and the performative pressures of graded assessment rubrics. By providing causal explanations for these perceived outcomes, this paper moves beyond describing technology use. It offers actionable insights for international teacher educators and policymakers, arguing for the co-construction of a shared digital pedagogy vision across initial teacher education programmes to close the gap between policy rhetoric and classroom reality.
This study investigates how preservice mathematics teachers select and adapt textbook problems into real-life contexts through a realistic transformation procedure. The study involved 49 final-year preservice mathematics teachers (35 males, 14 females) enrolled at a state university in northern Turkey. Adopting a qualitative case study design, we analyzed 98 textbook problems selected and transformed by participants and drew on two rounds of semi-structured interviews to examine their decision-making during problem selection and transformation. Participants' task-design approaches were categorized based on their worksheets, transformed tasks, and interview accounts into two approach types: creating (re-contextualizing the task by constructing a new context) and elaborating (retaining the core mathematical structure while enriching an existing context). Because the study required task modification, an adhering approach (treating the textbook as an authoritative script and implementing tasks with minimal or no modification) was not used. Results show that both approaches improved the realism of problems, with particularly strong gains in contextual proficiency. Across both approaches, participants frequently incorporated realistic data and dialogue. Affective proficiency also improved but remained more challenging to establish at a fully sufficient level. The findings provide implications for teacher education on supporting preservice teachers in designing contextually plausible and purpose-driven mathematical tasks.
