AI-TPACK, Pedagogical Ethics Awareness, and Teaching Readiness among Accounting Teacher Professional Education Students: Evidence from an Universitas Negeri Medan

Abstract

Teacher professional education is increasingly expected to prepare graduates who can integrate generative artificial intelligence into classroom practice both competently and responsibly. Conventional technological pedagogical content knowledge frameworks were theorised around passive digital tools rather than generative systems, and empirical evidence on artificial intelligence specific teacher competencies within Indonesian teacher professional education remains limited. This study specifies and tests a model in which artificial intelligence literacy, prompt engineering skill, self-efficacy, and constructivist teaching beliefs are associated with teaching readiness through two sequential mediators: artificial intelligence integrated pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical ethics awareness. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 128 students in the Accounting Education teacher professional education programme at Universitas Negeri Medan, selected purposively on the criterion of prior generative artificial intelligence use. Data were analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling using five thousand bootstrap subsamples; effect sizes and ninety-five per cent bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals are reported for every path, and the reflective specification of each construct was examined through confirmatory tetrad analysis. All eight hypothesised relationships were statistically supported. Each of the four antecedents was positively associated with integrated pedagogical content knowledge, which was in turn positively associated with both teaching readiness and pedagogical ethics awareness, and ethics awareness complementarily and partially mediated the competence–readiness association. The study offers initial empirical support for prompt engineering skill as a construct that is empirically distinguishable from artificial intelligence literacy, and for pedagogical ethics awareness as a mechanism that helps account for the association between competence and readiness. Because the design is cross-sectional and the sample is drawn from one subject-specific cohort at a single institution, the findings are interpreted as associations within this setting rather than as causal effects or as representative of Indonesian teacher professional education more broadly.