Methodology

Research questions

The brief for the research on the 2005-7 cohort of ICT PD clusters was to provide a broad national profile of the impact of the programme across the country as a whole. It has not been our role to evaluate specific clusters or their particular PD models. To this end the core research question being addressed is not so much to identify which particular models of PD are most effective, but rather to conduct a survey-based study to evaluate how well, and in what respects, the national ICT PD School Cluster initiative has been meeting the objectives of stakeholders and participants across the cohort. In doing this we addressed the following core research question:

How effective overall was the 2005-7 ICT PD programme in meeting its goals of:

• increasing teachers’ ICT skills, confidence and knowledge related to the educational applications of ICTs, and
• promoting quality classroom learning experiences for students?

Research strategy and data collection

Survey data were gathered from all 20 of the 2005-7 cohort clusters. These comprised responses from both pre- (Baseline) and post- (End of Project) programme surveys of all participants. In order to maximise validity of comparison across cohorts, the Baseline and End of Project instruments were based on the equivalent questionnaires developed for the previous cohorts in the programme and reported separately in previous reports to the Ministry.

The profile of the 2005 cohort on entry to the programme, as established by the baseline survey of 2005, along with entry-point comparisons between this and previous cluster cohorts, has been reported separately to the Ministry (Ham et al. 2005). This report focusses on the effects of the programme evidenced through retrospective self-report data gathered in the End of Project survey (October 2007).

Respondent demographics

In all, 1246 valid End of Project survey responses were received from teachers in the 20 cohort clusters. This represents an estimated response rate of c.60% for the End of Project survey. The End of Project response rate is consistent with response rates for the other ‘online’ surveys of ICT PD cluster teachers conducted prior to 2007.

It appears that the demographic distribution of the respondent group for the End of Project survey was dissimilar to that of the broader teacher population in the ICT PD programmes in terms of gender and in terms of sector. About 75% of respondents were females and 25% were males, which, when broken down by sector represents a ratio of female to male teachers among the primary sector respondents of 78 and in the secondary sector of 65. Compared to the general gender distribution of teachers in the respective sectors, therefore,  male teachers were notably underrepresented in the 2005-7 ICT PD cohort and surveys, as they have been in most previous cohorts and surveys.

About 72% of responding teachers taught at primary school level, 27% at secondary, and 1% taught both primary and secondary students. As had been the case for all but one of the previous cohorts, the proportion of primary participants in this ICT PD cohort was significantly larger than that of secondary. In this cohort primary teachers are over represented compared to secondary teachers by margins higher than the two previous cohorts but similar to those in the first three (1999-2001, 2002-4, 2002-5). The 2003-5 cohort remains the only ICT PD cohort since 1999 in which secondary and primary teachers, and males and females, have taken part in similar proportions to those in the general teaching population.

A strong correlation was evident in studies of previous ICT PD cohorts between the length of time that individual teachers were actively engaged in the programme and their subsequent levels of confidence and classroom usage of ICTs. This may account for the tendency for respondents to have been actively engaged in their programmes for longer rather than shorter lengths of time. In the 2005-7 cohort some 55% of teachers’ were actively engaged in the ICT PD programme for more than 2 of the 3 years of the programme. Only 7% of teachers had been in a programme for short-term periods of less than six months (Table 4). Overall these proportions are roughly comparable with those for the two prior cohorts, but higher for the specific proportion taking part for more than 31 of the 36 months.