Research on Primary School Teacher Education in The Digital Era

Narrative Synthesis of Bibliometric Studies and Systematic Reviews, 2021–2025

Abstract

Research on teachers and digital technology has grown quickly, but it is unclear how much of it concerns primary school teachers. This article presents a narrative synthesis of 17 bibliometric studies and systematic reviews published between 2021 and 2025 on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), teachers' digital competence, digital literacy and artificial intelligence (AI) in teacher education. The synthesis follows guidance for overviews of reviews and is reported with reference to PRISMA 2020. Each study was mapped by database, period, corpus size, population and main findings, and the studies were compared qualitatively without pooling any counts. Three findings emerged. First, eight of the 17 studies describe publication trends; all report growth, but they date the acceleration differently (2008–2016, 2015–2019, the pandemic years and the period after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022). Second, the United States is named first or among the leading countries by volume in five of the six studies that report country rankings, and Indonesia appears among the leading contributors in two corpora. Third, only three of the 17 studies target primary school teachers, and they retained 31 to 50 articles, whereas corpora on teachers in general hold roughly 1,600 to 3,600 records. A shift from TPACK to an AI-oriented version of the framework (AI-TPACK) is documented by one study. The results rest on figures reported by the original authors, the corpora probably overlap, and Scopus and Web of Science favor English-language journals. A bibliometric study confined to primary school teachers, especially in Indonesia, is still needed.