Abstract In today’s education field, information technology is increasingly becoming an important driving force for changes in the teaching mode. In order to explore the influencing factors and development paths of IT-assisted early childhood teachers’ teaching competence, this paper, based on the contextualized expected value theory, selected early childhood teachers to conduct a questionnaire survey to explore the role of IT-assisted and expected value beliefs (i.e., self-efficacy and perceived usefulness) in the development of IT-supported teaching competence. Based on this, the path of IT-assisted teachers’ teaching competence enhancement is proposed, and two groups of early childhood teachers are selected to conduct experiments to validate the effect of the path of IT-assisted teachers’ teaching competence enhancement. The results showed that IT-assisted positively affected teachers’ perceived usefulness and self-efficacy through positively affecting teachers’ self-learning and informationalized teaching (p < 0.05). After IT-assisted teaching, the teaching ability of teachers in the observation group was significantly improved, with 29.0% to 58.2% improvement in teaching awareness and attitude, teaching content innovativeness, combination of foundation and skills, and theory-to-practice. In this paper, the path of improving teachers’ teaching ability with the assistance of information technology is practicable.
Li et al. (2025) studied this question.