Influence of Pre-Service Training on STEM Teachers’ Attitudes Toward ICT-Enhanced Teaching: Mediating Roles of Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness

Integrating information and communication technology (ICT) into STEM education enhances instructional quality and cultivates students' interdisciplinary problem-solving. STEM teachers' attitudes-driven by perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU)-are pivotal in ICT adoption, and pre-service training offers a vital opportunity to shape these attitudes. Yet, empirical studies investigating how specific training strategies influence ICT attitudes via PEOU and PU remain scarce. Using a mixed-methods approach combining questionnaires and interviews, the results indicate that pre-service training significantly improved STEM teachers' attitudes toward ICT-enhanced teaching. Socially interactive strategies (role models and collaboration) enhanced attitudes via PEOU by boosting confidence and reducing technology-related anxiety, cognitive design strategies (reflection and instructional design) operated through PU by emphasizing ICT's pedagogical value, and experiential feedback strategies (authentic experience and feedback) influenced attitudes through both PEOU and PU, fostering integrated technical and pedagogical development. These findings support an integrated SQD-TAM framework and provide practical guidance for designing pre-service STEM teacher programs to promote sustained ICT adoption in China, and meanwhile highlights the importance of strategically sequencing training to cultivate both technological competence and pedagogical insight among future STEM educators.