Effects of the 2005 – 2007 ICT PD Programme on Teachers

The main programme-level goals of the ICT PD school clusters initiative with regard to the effects on teachers themselves were:

• Increased skills among teachers across a range of educationally useful ICTs.
• Increased teacher confidence about their personal use of ICTs and about the use of ICTs with and by students in classes.
• Improved understandings of the roles that ICTs can play in improving classroom teaching and learning.
• Engagement of teachers in critically reflective communities of practice through and about ICTs.

Nationally, there was a clear and significant increase/improvement in relation to all of these indicators over the period of the programme.

Teachers’ ICT skills

Over the period of the programme teachers’ skills in using ICTs increased significantly, especially, but not exclusively, for those who at the beginning of the programme had rated their skill levels as either very low or non-existent. As can be seen in Table 5, below, there were significant reductions across the board in the proportions of teachers who rated their skills as low or non-existent, and significant increases in the proportion who rated their skill level as high or very high. This was the case even with regard to ICTs such as word processing where the great majority of teachers entered the programme already with reasonable pre-existing levels of competence. By the end of the programme very solid majorities of teachers felt they had moderate or high skills with regard to file management (94%), basic computer operation (94%), word processing (98%), Internet (94%) and telecommunications (96%). Lower but still relatively high levels of end of programme competence were reported with regard to graphics (81%), spreadsheets (67%), databases (57%) and multimedia packages (72%), though these still show significant increases compared to entry point proportions. The increases in teachers’ skill levels during the programme was considerable across all ICTs, but it was most notable in relation to graphics and multimedia applications.

Demographic analysis of these results show some continued relationship between gender and teachers skill levels in favour of male and secondary teachers at the start and the end of the programme. The gender differences reduced over the period of the programme but remained significant across virtually all ICTs even at the end. The sector differences all but disappeared the end of the three years, the only notable remaining differences being that secondary teachers reported higher skill levels with basic operations and spreadsheets, and primary teachers reported higher skill levels in the use of graphics.

The impact of the programme on teachers’ skill levels was clearly significant across the full range of educationally useful skills measured, though skill with certain ICTs such as spreadsheets among secondary teachers and multimedia and graphics packages among primary teachers seem to have been emphasized in the different sectors.

Teacher confidence about the use of ICTs

Changes in the confidence of teachers about using ICTs were investigated with regard to two elements: their confidence as personal users of ICTs, and their confidence about using ICTs with classes of learners. Both of these increased significantly over the period of the programme from what were moderate and low levels of confidence respectively on entry.

At the end of the project, many teachers reported that at the beginning of the project they had been less than confident as personal users of ICTs. Seven percent of teachers classified themselves as having been ‘anxious’ and 24% of them were ‘not confident’ in this regard. By the end of the programme less than 1% of the teachers said they were ‘anxious’ and only 1% were still ‘not confident’ about the personal use of ICTs. By the end of the programme over four-fifths (84%) of teachers stated that they had become either ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ about their personal use of ICTs.

Teachers’ confidence about ICT use with classes also increased significantly during the programme. Teachers reported that on entry, they had been even less confident about using ICTs with classes than they had been about their personal use. At that point 14% of them self-identified as ‘anxious’ about this, and 30% identified themselves as ‘not confident’. By the end of the programme, however, the percentage of ‘anxious’ or ‘not confident’ teachers had dropped from 44% to 3%. Correspondingly, the percentage of ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ teachers had increased from 28% to 77%. Figure 1 illustrates the change in teachers’ confidence about the use of ICTs with classes.

Figure 1: Teachers’ confidence about using ICTs with classes before and after the ICT PD programme

As was also the case for confidence gains in relation to personal use, these confidence gains in relation to classroom use of ICTs were related to all of gender, sector and length of involvement demographics. Female teachers made significantly more confidence gains than male teachers (X²>35; df=3; p<.001), primary teachers reported significantly more gains in confidence about classroom use than secondary teachers (X²19.28; df=3; p<.001), and confidence gains were also positively correlated with the length of time teachers had actively participated in the programme (X²=22.89; df=8; p<.001) (See Table 6, & Figure 2). The longer teachers took active part in ICT PD the greater the increase in their confidence about using ICTs with classes.

Figure 2: Increases in individual teachers’ confidence about use of ICTs with classes, by length of active involvement in programme

Teachers’ understanding of the role of ICTs in teaching and learning

Teachers in this cohort generally had positive views on the role of ICTs in education. At the end of the programme many of the teachers’ still felt there were a number of constraints on their effective implementation of ICTs into teaching and learning, but their views had, if anything, become even more positive about their potential in other respects, both in improving their teaching and in fostering effective learning.

To address this indicator of the impact of the ICT PD programmes on teachers, we asked teachers what they saw as the benefits of ICTs in teaching and learning on the basis of their experience with ICTs during the programme; what concerns they had about the incorporation of ICTs into their teaching programmes; how, if at all, incorporating ICTs had changed their ways of teaching, and the contribution the programme had made to their understanding of teaching and learning in general. Their responses to these questions give an overview of what the teachers’ own broad understandings were at the end of the programme in relation to the role of ICTs in education and how widely spread such views were among them.

Benefits of integrating ICTs into teaching and learning

The qualitative analyses of previous cohorts reported benefits of integrating ICTs into their teaching and learning programmes, show that these may be grouped into about ten key categories (Ham et al 2005, 2006, Ham 2007). These are a mixture of teacher or teaching-oriented benefits and learner or learning-oriented benefits, with, from the teachers in this cohort, a heavy emphasis on the latter. The categories of benefit and their distribution for this cohort are:

Concerns

Technical issues, equipment reliability and inadequate access to ICTs for students seemed to account for most of the perceived constraints on ICT use, these being much more significant in peoples’ minds than pedagogical issues. Over a third of the teachers, for example, identified significant concerns about access to equipment for students (38%) and reliability, (36%) alongside lack of time (37%) for themselves to become familiar with the range of ICTs available as their main persisting concerns around the use of ICTs with students at the end of the programme (Figure 3). As has also been the case for previous cohorts, many of the teachers at the end of the project felt there was still a need for continuing PD around ICT use, even though the programme had significantly increased and improved their effective practices in this regard, though in comparison with earlier cohorts the proportions of teachers expressing significant concerns at the end of the programme does seem to have reduced across the board.

Figure 3: Teachers’ continuing concerns about the use of ICTs with classes

Contribution to wider understandings of teaching and learning more generally

When teachers were asked to describe the ways in which the ICT PD programme had contributed to their understanding of teaching and learning generally, responses ranged from ‘no effect’ to significantly deeper understandings of learning and pedagogy in general, well beyond the connection with ICTs.

Of all the comments made about the ways in which ICT PD programmes had contributed to teachers’ ‘understandings’ of teaching and learning in general, about a third related to the specific connections they had been able to make about the educational value of ICTs in teaching and learning, rather than what they had learned about teaching and learning ‘more generally’. Of those that did refer specifically to the role of the programmes in developing their ‘more general’ understandings of teaching and learning, about 18% said that there had been little or no contribution to their general pedagogical understandings, beyond the acquisition of practical ideas for integrating ICTs into their classroom programmes.

About half the comments of teachers, however, did identify such deeper or wider understandings and identified a number of key ways in which the programme had supplemented, challenged and even changed those understandings.

Many of these (c. 11% of total comments) involved teachers reporting that they now had a better understanding of student-centred teaching and learning, or that in some way their teaching had become more student-focused or more relevant to students as a result of the programme.

An even larger proportion (c. 30%) stated that they had significantly increased their knowledge of different teaching/learning styles and theories, or were enabled to make clearer connections between their day to day practice and the various learning and teaching theories and models outlined in the programmes. Most prominent among the particular theories and models identified were ‘enquiry learning’, ‘learning styles’, ‘collaborative and/or cooperative learning’, and various taxonomies of ‘thinking skills’ (Bloom’s, SOLO etc.).

Thirdly, there was also a substantial proportion who commented on the programme as challenging and changing their pedagogical perspectives and understandings, either through the content of the PD programme, or, more often, through the opportunities it provided for sharing and critical discussion with colleagues, outside ‘experts’, and so on. Many of these comments spoke of the teachers adopting a more ‘critical’ or more ‘reflective’ approach to their teaching as a result of their new awareness of pedagogical and learning theories and research.

Finally, we note that there were two elements of significant sector difference in the nature of the comments on wider deeper understandings gained from the programmes. The first is that primary teachers were twice as likely as secondary to comment on increased understanding of specific learning theories. The second is that secondary teachers were twice as likely as primary to state that the programme had had little or no effect on their pedagogical understandings in the broader sense.

Teachers’ classroom practices

When teachers were asked about the extent to which their classroom practices had changed as a result of participation in the ICT PD programme, over a third of them indicated their classroom practices had changed to ‘a large extent’ or ‘completely’, and just under half of them (48%) said their classroom practices had changed ‘to some extent’. Only a very small group (3%) said no change had occurred in their classroom practices at all (Table 8).

There were sector (but not as in previous cohorts, gender) related differences in teachers’ responses to this question. Primary teachers stated higher levels of change in their classroom practice than secondary teachers (X2>35, df=4, p<0.001). Whereas 43% of primary teachers indicated a complete or large change happened to their classroom practices, 25% of secondary teachers respectively indicated the same levels of change (Table 9). While the great majority (86%) of teachers reported at least some element of change in their classroom practices, secondary teachers were almost twice as likely as primary teachers to be in the group of teachers reporting little or no change in classroom practice as a result of the programme.